


Madrigal

by seventhTense



Category: Homestuck
Genre: But Not Medieval, Civilization has rebuilt itself in a Kingdoms-style setup, Classpect-based magic, Dirk POV primarily but not exclusively, Kingdoms-based AU!, Long-term friends to angst-and-tension-ridden friends, M/M, More character/relationship tags to be added as they come up, More like Post-Apocalyptic, Sexy at the top and then SIGNIFICANTLY LESS SEXY for a good while, and also regular magic!, and then a bunch of bullshit, and then lovers, at some point, but "Years in the Future..." to the point where like, its gonna be a long one, violence but not that much
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-05
Updated: 2017-06-25
Packaged: 2018-11-09 02:32:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 31,156
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11095068
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seventhTense/pseuds/seventhTense
Summary: Dirk Strider, the Prince of the relatively peaceful kingdom of Byrgenn, has been managing to make it through from one day to the next, his life filled with training to one day inherit the crown from his older brother, the King.One very bad, no good night later, and both Dirk and his best friend slash knight Jake English are sent running for their lives, scurrying through the forests and countrysides of the Gaean continent in search of saftey, shelter, and some way to fight back against the demon that robbed them of their home.





	1. I Can Feel It Coming (In The Air Tonight)

Typically, when Dirk Strider wakes up, it’s a pretty fucking quick trip from the depths of blissfully thoughtless slumber to full alertness. He’s always thought that waking up that fast _probably_ isn’t the healthiest thing in the world, and _probably_ says a not-insignificant number of things about both his mental state and the unholy amount of blue light he irradiates his eyeballs with on a daily basis, but then again if Dirk Strider worried about the many, many unhealthy things he did to himself on a near daily basis, a very, very different man would Dirk Strider be.

All of this is to say that for pretty much the full extent of his memory banks, Dirk had always associated waking up with instant, unfaltering alertness, an lightening-bolt, all systems go boot to his internal systems. More to the point, over the course of the past eighteen hours, even given Dirk’s penchant for running himself ragged as frequently as was possible, Dirk had suffered through one of the more exhausting days he’d had in recent memory. His morning had been filled with a half-dozen hours stuck inside a half-dozen different but equally stuffy conference chambers, arguing with several dozen sets of priests, middling nobles, business owners, advisers, advocates of various shapes, sizes and causes, and so on, all vying for the Prince’s ear, or more accurately, hoping that by potentially catching the Prince’s ear, they might finagle a direct route to the far more difficult to catch aural canals of the King himself.

A very, very brief and unsatiating lunch later, and Dirk was promptly locked inside the well-furnished but still intolerably stifling confines of what was officially dubbed the University of the Nobles, and more accurately and colloquially was referred to as the Room in Which a Bunch of High-Bred Twenty-Somethings Sat Within While Balding Professors With Aging Doctorates Attempted Valiantly to Cram Information Vital to the Running of Their Royal and Quasi-Royal Offices and Duties Down Their Oft-Yawning and More-Oft-Senselessly-Gaping Gullets.

Well, maybe only Dirk called it that, seeing as most of his “classmates” probably couldn’t pronounce half the words in the title, nor maintain an active attention span long enough to string RWBoH-BT-WSWWBPWADAVCIVRoTRQ-RODDTO-YM-O-S-GG together as messily acronymed shorthand, but it was accurate, and when Dirk had shared his personal name for the lecture chamber with his page, he’d earned some serious chuckles for his effort, so it worked.

Goofy personal name or not, most days Dirk wasn’t bored with the lectures so much as he just got fed the fuck up with the uncaring laziness of his peers, and more often than not left the hours-long classes with a arm full of quippily-annotated notes and doodles, and a head full of simmering, steaming frustration.

And, as he did most days, Dirk decided to vent said frustrations in the one way he had found to be completely reliable over the years; sparring. From a little after five til well into the night, Dirk sparred with any guards or knights he could coerce into dueling with him. Well, that wasn’t quite accurate. He spent the first hour or so doing that, but Dirk’s reputation for being a terrifyingly competent and merciless sparring partner was infamous throughout the Castle- hell, throughout a good part of the Kingdom of Byrgenn itself, and so he very quickly ran out of willing partners. This had only frustrated him all the more, steam building within him more and more without any way to vent it out, and he probably would have decimated a good number of training dummies and gone to bed deeply unsatisfied, had he not managed to catch the eye of his best friend, a young up-and-coming Knight, assigned to personally serve the Prince most of the time, but right then and through most of that day as well making himself busy, bustling about the castle courtyard, attending to his own set of daily duties.

After years of friendship and gradually accumulated habit, Dirk’s friend recognized the look in his eyes instantly, and after quickly finishing his current task, said a jaunty “Fuck it,” to the rest of his chores, and rushed to join Dirk, fists and practice blade at the ready.

They had sparred, fierce grins and dripping sweat, til the early hours of the morning.

In short, when Dirk finally made his way to bed after a long, tension-melting shower, he was more exhausted than he had been in a long time. As far as he could remember, really. Sure, he had finished the day sparring many times before, his muscles, stinging and sore from exertion as they were, were fine, on the whole. His lethargy, brain-numb and bone-tired, stemmed more from an emotional exhaustion, one that, Dirk would realize later, had been building up for a long, long time, and somehow in the midst of sparring with Jake English, the mess of conflicting, feedback-looping feelings had clashed together in just the right way to all fall apart and drain from his soul like fat from an infamous old-world grill. When his body met the lush, plush contours of his bed, Dirk passed out fast and he passed out hard.

Which made it completely understandable, then, that when the weight of another body dipped the edge of the mattress, and when the warmth of another person crept close enough to him to feel the heat of their skin, and when the person, having failed to rouse Dirk with a couple of nudges and some breathy, urgently whispered pleas, climbed on top of Dirk to jostle him more directly, he did not instantly snap to attention as was his habit. He didn’t even wake up, not really. So exhausted was he, that when Dirk Strider’s eyes opened ever-so-slightly to catch the blurry, moonlit outline of a man who had haunted his dreams since they had met at the age of 11, Dirk was convinced he was still dreaming, and acted accordingly.

It took a few moments after Dirk’s eyes opened to fully recognize and process the sight before him, but once he did, _oh_ , what a sight it was. It was the sort of vision Dirk had dreamed waking up to a thousand times, the sort of vision that was so dearly, intimately craved in his heart that, still warm and molasses-slow from sleep, his mind dropped all its well-honed defenses and barriers, and he opened completely, as Dirk had so desperately needed to do all these many years.

He saw the figure propped up on all fours above him grin upon realizing Dirk was awake, and a smile curved slowly on Dirk’s lips, the kind of gentle, honest expression he only allowed himself outside the confines of reality. The figure’s expression shifted slightly above him, clear surprise lifting the man’s dark, bushy eyebrows as high as they could go, but his grin didn’t falter one bit- if anything, it softened, fond admiration coloring what Dirk could make out of the man’s face in the sparse moonlight seeping into his chambers through the curtained windows beside his bed. He extricated his arm out from beneath his sheets, weaving clumsily around where the intruder had planted his hands and knees, and reached out a hand towards the man’s face, Dirk’s lankiness only helping him cross a good half of the distance between them. Somehow, though, his newfound bedpartner seemed to know precisely what Dirk had been trying to do even as the motion began, and had leaned in to meet his hand halfway, a warm, slightly-scruffy cheek settling smoothly into Dirk’s palm as if it had been made to rest there.

Dirk felt an oddly realistic-feeling tear seep from the corner of his eye, oceans of tender, heartfelt affection coloring the gentle half-whisper of “ _Jake_ ,” that fell from his lips. He stroked the figures cheek with the pad of his thumb, every pictometer of contact between them sending waves of equal parts contentment and excitement coursing through Dirk’s body.

The figure, Jake (because who else would it be, who else had it ever been playing this role in Dirk’s desperation-fueled, horrifically needy dreamscapes since the two of them crossed paths?) let out a small chuckle, air puffing out of his nose with the noise to breeze softly against Dirk’s wrist. He moved to softly caress the back of Dirk’s hand with his own, the roughness of a dozen calluses guiltily, perfectly memorized during the grapples and lockholds of a dozen dozen sparring matches scritching softly across Dirk’s skin. Warmly, Jake half whispered back“Howdy-doody there, Mister Strider.”

Dirk’s fond smile grew twice as wide, both from the absurdity of someone saying the phrase ‘howdy-fucking-doody’ in the same way some Romeo in one of Dirk’s ironically/not-so-ironically favorite antiquated movies would solliloquize about their beloved, and also because that was exactly the kind of thing that was so completely Jake that it made Dirk’s heart flutter a little all the same.

God he felt good. Dirk felt really goddamn _good_ , laying here with a warm lap of reciprocally affectionate English. A Jake English that, despite all Dirk’s worries, all Dirk’s fears after fears after fears, obviously, genuinely returned the same levels of affection that burst forth through the freshly-shattered dams around Dirk’s heart, and gods above and gods below that felt so fucking _good_. A feeling that only helped to convince Dirk all the more he was luxuriating in the midst of a particularly, blessedly lucid dream... and honestly, if he was dreaming, why the hell not take it a step farther? It wasn’t as if he’d get the fucking chance to in real life, anyways.

With that instant’s thought having sufficiently swept any further reservations from Dirk’s mind, he rose up slightly, relying on his still-sore but very solid core and the hand still pressed delicately to his crush’s cheek to keep him steady enough to press his lips softly against Jake’s own. Jake let out a small noise of surprise, but one that was just close enough to a moan to encourage Dirk’s newly-awoken assertiveness (and his libido, very quickly playing catch-up to his other senses) all the more. Soft half-moans of his own rumbling in his chest, Dirk deepened the kiss, slowly working Jake’s mouth more open as Jake began to return Dirk’s advances in kind.

They stayed there for a few moments longer before Dirk drew back, sleep-numbed lungs needing air far more quickly than usual- but the instant oxygen hit them, Dirk was moving forwards again, lips searching hungrily in the dark for Jake’s cheek, his neck, each kiss and nip and lovebite from Dirk drawing a hitched breath and a quiet moan from his beloved. He sucked and nipped against a spot on Jake’s clavicle, and got a deep, fervent “Mmh, _fuck_ , Strider...” murmured into his ear for his trouble.

With every passing moan and moment, Dirk found himself growing more and more aware of the rapidly stiffening presence in his boxers, heat and need spreading across his hips until they began rising on their own accord to find that Jake’s hips, in that perfectly timed way of dreams, had started to press down towards Dirk in kind. Dirk groaned in pleasure and in pure elated joy (He felt the same way, he wanted the same things, holy fuck, holy _fuck_ ) and started grinding against Jake through the thin sheets separating them in earnest. Instantly, Jake responded in kind, directing his hips purposefully now, shifting their angle to line up with Dirk’s, the hard length of what was unmistakably Jake’s dick rutting up against Dirk’s own.

Which was more than e-fucking-nough for Dirk. Clumsily, but with the force and strength born of overwhelmingly thirst, he pulled the sheets out from between the two of them, letting their hips roll against each other with nothing but the thin canvas of Dirk’s boxers and what felt like skintight nylon tights on Jake between them. Dirk mirrored Jake as he pressed his face inelegantly into the crook of Jake’s neck, each rutting needy and artless against the other, breaths hot and heady against each other’s skin.

But this was Dirk’s wet dream, and he was fucked if he wasn’t going to get as fucked as possible before the light of day snapped him back to his depressingly chaste real life. Roughly, he pushed Jake back, just far enough for Dirk to reach down and free his dick from its sweat and pre-come-stained trappings. Clumsily, he reached for Jake’s own waistband, the noise of surprise from the other man doing nothing to deter him as Dirk pulled what was apparently a set of dark-colored tights pulled over a pair of pale-gold-colored booty shorts (the fuck?) down as far as they could go. He paused there for just a moment, grasping Jake’s waistband, the back of his hand brushing against Jake’s balls, taking in the sight of what was... just the most absolutely fucking gorgeous cock in all of existence, Dirk was certain. In shape, color, length, every aspect of it was just... _perfect_ in Dirk’s eyes. Later, he’d come to realize that, yeah, he wasn’t exactly the least biased of observers at that particular moment in time, and even if he hadn’t been hornier than he had quite possibly ever been in his life, having crushed on the owner of said cock didn’t make him exactly the most unbiased judge of beauty in the world.

In them moment, though, Dirk was frozen, overwhelmed with the oddest and yet most overpowering starstruck feeling he had ever experienced. A feeling that, a moment later, was completely overridden with unyielding sexual need. Roughly, he took a hold of both his and Jake’s dicks in one hand, pressing the bottom of their lengths together as he began to jerk them both off, tossing his head back with a moan as his entire body shuddered in pleasure at the contact, the friction. He moved towards Jake again to bring them both into another kiss until... until...

Slowly, through the rush of blood in his ears and the rush of endorphins through his veins, Dirk finally picked up on the soft but increasingly emphatic half-whispers of “Dirk! Dirk, c’mon now mate, snap out of it Strider, c’mon,” that had been spilling from Jake since Dirk had taken their cocks out a minute or two ago.

Blinking a few times, Dirk stilled, his hand slowly stopping it’s frantic movements, his chest still heaving as he tried to focus his eyes properly on Jake for the first time since the dream had began. Could you even focus your eyes in dreams?

Jake blew out a sigh of relief, shaking his head, the nervous rambling that was as much an integral part of Jake English’s being as his arms and blood were starting up anew. “Phew! Close one there, didn’t think I’d get through in time. Not that I’m one to stop this kind of thing, honest to all the naughtiest Gods above, Dirk, I would have been all too ecstatic to let things proceed in the direction they were, erm, proceeding, except I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that you’d more likely than not pass right the frig back out again as soon as you... erm, well, _afterwards_ , and between having to wake you up from a presumably heady post-coital haze and the inevitable jelly-legs we’d both be suffering from, I really can’t afford that right now.” He grinned sheepishly, or at least tried to, every inch of skin flush with color and embarrassment, his expression tense and nervous.

Dirk was starting to suspect that this, in fact, might not be a dream. It was a distinct possibility. But Jake had started talking again, those sorts of worries could wait until after the melodious, sing-song symphony of his voice stopped playing.

“I really do hate to bust in- er, poor choice of words, rather, I hate to interrupt what was clearly a much-needed snoozle on your part, Dirk, really absolutely none of tonight is going even remotely as planned to be absolutely fucking honest with you.” His voice had started climbing in pitch and urgency and what Dirk was starting to recognize as edge of hysterics, cut off only by a harsh, curt laugh Jake directed at himself. “Well, hah, that implies that I had a plan to begin with- as you yourself have admonished me oh-so-many a time, I’m more of the improvisational sort, much to my disadvantage all too often, ahaha... well, erm, yes, at any rate, I would have happily waited until dawn to talk with you, but, uhm, you see I uh-”

“Jake,” Dirk interrupted him, not unkindly.

“Ah, yes, my most bro-ly of bros?”

“The fuck is your point, dude?” Dirk really was starting to get the feeling that this wasn’t a dream. Still could be a really weird fucking lucid dream, his fucked-up subconscious had played worse tricks on him before, but it really didn’t feel like that was the case anymore, it really didn’t.

“Yes, the point, quite right. Uhm,” Jake began, eruditely. He took a deep breath, then looked Dirk square in the eye, moonlit emerald to moonlit amber. “Dirk Strider, I need your help in a matter of life and death.”

A pause, a few beats of silence that were clearly not the reaction Jake had been going for, so he doggedly continued. “Er, namely my life and/or death, depending on how forthcoming your help may or may not be.” That too-tense-to-be-convincing sheepish grin came back, Jake reaching up to tug at his collar nervously. “You see, I may have gotten myself in a spot of trouble, and I’m _pretty_ sure that unless I get out of the castle in a remarkably short amount of time, the quite lovely guardspeople you’ve got employed around here are gonna absolutely fucking kill me.”

Jake shot him a look, one that couldn’t really be thought of as anywhere in the vicinity of charmingly sheepish anymore- at this point it was more akin to manically, deathly desperate, and as life reasserted itself to what was assuredly going to be a far more typical level of utter shittiness, Dirk was absolutely, completely convinced that he hadn’t been dreaming.

He let go of their cocks, and flicked on his bedside lamp, mind shunting all thoughts about what had been going on over the past few minutes to the back of his head, as far back as they could be shoved, to be dealt with at a later time, probably never, or alternatively some day when Dirk really, really wanted to literally fucking die from embarassment. But yeah, later. Apparently, right now, he had shit to do. “Yeah, okay. Toss me the clothes I’ve got on the desk chair over there and let’s get a fuckin’ move on.”

\---

Twenty minutes later, the two men were sneaking very slowly and very carefully through the hallways that ran maze-like around Dirk’s floor of the Byrgennian Palace. Dirk was taking point, having memorized the castle layout long ago, as Jake nervously fidgeted and kept watch behind him. They approached yet another corner T-ing off of the hallway, their footsteps slowing all the more as Dirk pressed himself against the wall, breath held as he leaned out just enough for a quick scan of the corridor beyond. Empty, thank fuck.

Motioning Jake to follow again- and trying to ignore the depressingly loud sigh of relief from the other man as he did so- Dirk continued on. He closed his eyes to focus for a moment, and checked the mental map he had compiled ages ago of this part of the palace... alright, good, this was a pretty long hallway, doorless and usually pretty uninhabited, serving only to put some distance between the ‘important’ people living on this floor, like Dirk, and the High-Servants’ quarters nearby. As good a place as any to try and milk some more information out of his... well, out of whatever Jake was to him now. Kidnapper? Partner in Crime? Manipulative charmer all too aware of his looks and the effect he had on the Prince of the kingdom, using Dirk’s affections for him until he no longer...

Actually, as nasty as that scenario was and as much as it played to the large chunk of Dirk’s brain dedicated to Paranoid Thoughts & Co, going any deeper down that rabbit hole would require thinking more about Dirk’s ‘affections’ towards Jake, and that would require... well, safe to say there was a very securely walled-off portion of Dirk’s mind at the moment. After they had both... put themselves back together, so to speak, neither he nor Jake had made any mention of what Dirk had done, and that was just fine for Dirk. There was way too much going on right now for him to be spending even a single iota of brain power on yet another round of One-Man Dirkscourse, as his friend the Leohtian Princess had dubbed it one day, and honestly even if there wasn’t, Dirk probably would have shoved all thoughts relating to the incident in as deep and dark a mental chamber as was possible until he absolutely had to face it, or his shitty fucking subconcious tortured him with it, whichever came first.

Yeah, he was perfectly satisfied ignoring that hot little box of rocks completely until he was someplace quiet and safe enough to have the inevitable freakout over what he did. Almost did. Still wanted to do. It was a hot little box of freakout-inducing rocks, he was ignoring it, and he was doing a _super_ good job at it, how the fuck about interrogating Jake now, yeah, how about just doing that instead for a bit. Yeah.

Turning just slightly to stage-whisper over his shoulder, Dirk motioned Jake to get closer. “So, not to pry or anything, but if you want my help with whatever the fuck is going on with you, English, you’re gonna have to let me in on this shit a little bit. Not that I wouldn’t help you regardless, we’re bros and all, but just as a matter of having a bit of fucking manners about this, I guess?”

Jake sighed, running a jittering hand through his hair as he quite obviously tried to still the new, separate bundle of nerves and worries Dirk’s question had opened up to the cold night air. “Right, you’re right. I... fuck. Alright, basically, I’m, um, not who you think I am, Dirk.”

He snorted, amused. “Wow English, no shit? Here I was thinking all this skulking around the palace in your fuckin’ kinky Gold and Cream themed Phantom Thief costume or whatever you’ve got going on there was just part of the nightly duties of your average Joe Soldier.”

Jake’s outfit was pretty fucking weird, now that Dirk could get a second full glance at it. Instead of the typical skull or movie-theamed t-shirt and shorts Jake clothed himself in during his casual hours, the man’s top half was covered in some thin, plush-looking thing, halfway between a hoodie and a baseball tee, the sleeves barely long enough to brush against the middle of his forearm, the whole affair colored in tones of pale and rich gold, save for a curvy wings motif emblazoned in white in the center of his chest. Even more ridiculously, a spiky-looking gold collar the same fabric as the hoodieshirt encircled his neck before leading into a waist-length cape of all things. Like, an actual fucking cape. And here Dirk was supposed to be the haughty, pompously dressed royal douche. Chirst.

There was also the matter of the black tights that covered Jake’s legs and hips, clumsily shoved over the booty shorts Dirk had noticed earlier, but as weird as those looked too, again, they brought up thoughts of ‘earlier,’ and whoa, hey, whaddya know Jake was responding now, awesome fucking timing, hahaha.

Jake groaned at the thickly and ironically layered-on sarcasm, but it was obvious to anyone with ears that the guy’s heart just wasn’t in it. “Yes, yes, Dirk, you’re very funny and clever, hoohoohoo, haahaahaa, raucaous applause abounds from every corner. Just listen for a sodding sec, Jimminy-kicking-Christ.” He took another steadying breath, failing to steady himself in any way, shape or form, but hey, oxygen’s still important to take in. “Okay, starting over. I’m not from Byrgenn, Dirk. Hell, I’m not from any of the four frigging Kingdoms, but that’s kinda beside the point, I guess. A couple months ago, when I first got here, I snuck in, erased some poor dupe’s name off the incoming soldiers’ roster, plunked my own in there, and uh, well we met pretty quickly after that so I guess you know the story post-then, pretty much.”

Dirk nodded, murmuring assent. It was basically what he expected, and to a lesser degree, what he feared. Leave it to Dirk to have the first guy he forms a serious friendship with and has his first fucking crush for end up being some sort of weird nomad spy or whatever. “So what then, you got in here, curried up some favor with the Prince so you could nab some of our sweet treasure stores? Knock off some official who pissed your family off or something?”

Jake sputtered at the accusations, actually stopping in the hallway as he emphatically shook his head and waved his arms no towards Dirk. “Good gods, Strider, no, a thousand times no! Well... okay I mean yes partially, to the stealing bit, sort of, but a rock-solid no to everyfuckingthing else!” The dude looked genuinely upset at what Dirk had said, and a sickly mixture of guilt and cold, pessimistic admiration for how hard Jake was selling this curled in the pits of Dirk’s mind. He tried to ignore both feelings as Jake stopped fidgeting, looked down towards his shoes. “I’d never try to use our friendship like that, Dirk, you’re...”

He took a deep breath, looked off to the side. “Uhm, look. I came here for one very specific reason, and one reason only, Strider. When I first made my way to the palace, I only planned on staying here for a week or two at the most- you know, getting to know the layout, marking which guards patrolled when, mapping out pathways, all that cool shit spies and the Ocean’s Whatever ladies do in those sweet re-remakes you showed me. But, uh...” The sheepish look from earlier returning, Jake glanced briefly towards Dirk. “You know as well as I do how well that plan worked out.”

Dirk nodded again. They had met when both he and Jake were about 13. Dirk’s brother, the relatively recently crowned King, had put out a call to all the noble and generations-old servant families in the Kingdom to send their best and brightest pre-teens to what was essentially a Kingdom-wide S _o You Think You Can Be The Young And Very Lonely Prince Dirk Strider’s New Best Friend And/Or Dance?_ competition, minus the dancing bit.

Suffice to say, Jake had been his typical weird and energetic self, caught Dirk’s attention, and, somehow, they had become fast friends, over the years following forming a bond that was honestly unlike anything Dirk could have imagined. They sparred, wrestled, explored the city and the surrounding countryside together, and spent more popcorn-and-sassy-commentary-fueled movie nights together than Dirk could count. Even if Dirk had any other friends besides Jake and the deep but online-only bonds he had forged with the Princesses of the Leoht and Ælet Kingdoms, the way he got along with Jake had been so singularly... perfect that he couldn’t think of the man’s face without thinking of him as his best friend.

Remaining expressionless as best he could, Dirk nodded again. “Okay, so... for the moment let’s say that we both accept that you found more than you were looking for here and got caught up in some sweet, tasty bro-ship unlike that which any human eyes, hands, brains or sweet, hot bodies have witnessed before or will ever witness again. ” What did he _just say about **saving that shit for later???**_   “Fuck! Sorry. What?" He got a snicker out of Jake, a genuine one, and as tense and distrustful and stressed as Dirk’s mindscape was, he couldn’t help but feel a bit of pride at that, just enough to wash out the embarrassment. “Whatever. So, all that said, what all changed to, uh, hasten up your schedule so much? You gotta be pretty skilled to have broken into the palace vaults like you implied you did earlier, what with the stealing and the murderous guardspeeps and whatever, and I can’t imagine that a thief as skilled as all that would let anything but the biggest, baddest fucktastrophies catch him unawares enough to panic all the way to my bedroom at whatthefuck-o’clock at night.”

Jake had the actual gall to blush at being called a skilled thief, pulling the whole back-of-the-neck scratch/humbly-embarrassed smile 2x combo like he had walked straight out of a goddamn romance anime. Dirk rolled his eyes and continued sneaking down the corridor, Jake falling in line again behind him as he replied, a different flavor of nervous waver coloring his half-whispers now. “Heheheh, it, uh, really isn’t like that Dirk. Or rather, it’s less that I’m some sort of wiley, super-cool master infiltrator and thievery-minded lad as it is that I happen to be, erm... well, let’s just say for now that my _natural talents_ so to speak aided me a great deal in getting here, and pretty much fuck all else once I got here.” Another nervous chuckle, and Dirk could hear the shame coloring this one. “The catastrophic clusterfuck part is right on the money, though, eheh...”

“Comforting as ever, dude, thanks.” Another corner... nobody, good. The room Dirk was looking for ought to be pretty close now...

“Ehehe, yes, uhm, well,” Jake cleared his throat, and Dirk could almost feel the heat on his cheeks. “With that established, let’s just say that I erm, received a very unexpected reminder of the urgency of my aforementioned infiltration-thievery-et-cetera mission, and was forced to get my sneaky boogie on right quick. And so I did. Zooshed around earlier tonight and nabbed the shit I was looking for, and to be honest Dirk I did manage to get about twice as far away as I expected before the guardsfolk caught wise that something was amiss. Hell, I did a pretty damn good job getting up to this floor in the first bloody place, I’ll tell you that, and nary a soul the wiser for my passage- er, as far as I know, or at least not until I was pretty friggin’ far past them.”

Dirk waved for Jake to slow as, at long last, they reached the storeroom Dirk had been leading them to- an unobtrusive and overall completely ordinary wooden door as close to the darkened, poorly-monitored rear side of the castle as it was possible to get on this floor. He double and triple-checked to make sure nobody was around, and, as Jake scuttled nervously up behind him, Dirk slowly pulled open the door.

The room itself was as empty as it could be- or rather, devoid of any life, at the very least. As far as non-living things went it was very much _not_ empty. Stacks and stacks of crates all packed full with sheafs of paper, vials of ink and white-out, pens and pencils of all shapes and sizes, and even some ancient, unused office decorations were piled high throughout the room, broken up only by some scattered chairs and footstools, an aging ladder that was probably more dangerous to try and use than just clambering up the crates yourself would be, and, most importantly, a single cleared pathway from the door at which Dirk stood to the room’s sole window on the opposite side of the storage closet, looking out into the night. Gesturing for Jake to follow, Dirk made his way inside, trusting him to close the door quietly behind them as he made his way to light the antiquated free-standing oil lamps positioned throughout the space.

The door closed and secured, Jake took a look around behind him, let out a soft whistle at the scale and age of the place. “Good gravy Dirk, the holy hell is this place?”

“Just an old storeroom, dude, calm down,” He continued to bustle about, lighting the room up as much as was possible- he had tried to maneuver around here in the dark before, and the infected splinters he had received from running into the aging boxes taught him a lesson about that he hadn’t forgotten. “Palace is full of rooms like this, just a place for them to store the shit they used to burn through like the customers at a shitty taco dive burn through TP, except in this situation the taco dive remodeled into an e-taco distribution center, and now they can store their toiletries and pulped paper goods in modest, easy-to-access cupboards like normal fucking people. Uhm, which is to say that when the Kingdoms went digital a handful of decades ago, this shit got mothballed “for future use” real fuckin’ quick. Found this room specifically when I was just a lil’ shit, best place in the castle for hiding or sneaking out, far as I know.”

The final lamp lit, Dirk turned back to Jake to find him casually strolling about the room, poking here and there curiously. Dirk couldn’t help but smile just the slightest bit- Jake had always been an explorer.

“Hell’s bells my man! It may seem ordinary to you, Sir Strider, but this sort of shit just _reeks_ of the kind of ancient, long-lost troves of secrets and treasures any adventurer worth his salt would kill to find.” Dirk had to give him that one, the oddly attractive stench of aging paper filled the room like a library-scented gas grenade had gone off in there years ago and nobody had bothered to air the place out since. “Absolutely smashing choice of location, Dirk, just perfect. Now then,” Having apparently finished his inspection, Jake straightened up, brushing imaginary debris off his tights. “Where be this secret passage to the outside, eh? Some sort of secret trapdoor underneath one of these crates- ooh, or perhaps a stealthily-concealed stairway behind a wall that you have to pull one of the lamp thingies to reveal?”

Dirk waited a few moments, soaking in the bizarre combination of optimism, excitement, and an overwhelming taste for adventure that constantly radiated off of Jake English, yet still somehow managed to catch Dirk by surprise whenever it flared up this much. Once he had mentally gathered himself, Dirk nodded slowly, walked past Jake to lean against the wall next to the storeroom’s ancient, glass porticullis, looking deep in thought. After a moment, he looked back up at Jake, a challenging smirk coloring his lips.

“How about this, English? I’ll show you the secret passage out of the room once you show me what exactly it is that you stole, and fill me in a little on why you think the folks here would kill you for taking it. Sound fair?” His expression was smug, but internally, Dirk was starting to really worry, the seriousness of the situation finally setting in now that he didn’t have to be quite as constantly alert as he had been on their way here. Jake was obviously in some really deep shit, and Dirk was starting to get real hecking anxious about what precisely he was getting into here.

Jake... thought about it for a few minutes. Literally, he actually stood there, stroking his chin for a full two and a half minutes as he considered Dirk’s proposal- a response that did abso-fucking-lutely nothing to ease the ever-growing pit of worry in Dirk’s guts. Finally, he nodded, and when he spoke, Jake sounded more serious than Dirk had ever heard him, the characteristic lilt completely gone from his voice, his voice pitched way lower than normal. “Alright Dirk, I’ll show you. I... really, really shouldn’t, Lord knows I was told a dozen times if not more not to be this... cavalier about showing off the goods like this, but damn it you’re my bro, Dirk Strider, and bros don’t keep secrets from bros.” An instant after he said that, Jake cringed at his own words. “Er, well rather they really, really _shouldn’t_ keep secrets from their bros, and if they absolutely have to they ought to pop the lid off of said secrets at the earliest possible poppertunity, which is precisely what I’m gonna do now. So...”

With Dirk’s eyes glued to his every movement, Jake reached behind him, underneath his cape, and retrieved what appeared to be a modestly-sized coin purse. As far as looks went, it wasn’t anything special, just a palm-sized cut of supple brown leather, tied together with a frayed length of string. Taking a deep breath first, Jake undid the knot holding the string in place, and slowly stuck his hand into the pouch... and continued to reach inside it farther and farther, way farther than should be possible for a pouch that size, until his entire forearm had vanish within it. Eventually, the muscles in the visible part of his arm shifted as he seemed to grab a hold of something, and, very slowly, very delicately, Jake began to pull the object out.

The opening of the satchel spread wider as Jake’s hand reappeared, far wider than it ought to, impossibly wider, and the reality-bending going on in front of Dirk’s eyes only made the softly spinning whirlpool in his stomach spin faster and grow wider. The object itself started to become visible- a handle of some sort, made of what looked to be solid, polished brass, the arc of the handle just barely wide enough in diameter to let Jake grasp it with his whole fist. Further it came out, revealing inch by inch what appeared to be a... lantern, of some sort. The handle attached to a solid hunk of brassy metal, beneath which two metal hoops reached down to an identical hunk of metal at the lantern’s base, the hoops joined by a horizontal circle of metal bisecting the spherical cage into hemispheres. And held inside the delicate, very simple cage that the brass rings formed was what looked to be a solitary paper lantern, neon orange and lit by a mysterious, brightly glowing white light nestled inside the paper.

Overall, it was exactly the kind of unassuming object that, when treated with the proper reverence and atmosphere, would bring a shudder of intimidated awe down the spines of even the most stoic of assholes, as it did for the one beholding it currently. Dirk swallowed dryly, a soft voice that didn’t feel like his own asking Jake “What is it?”

Jake’s expression grew disgruntled at that, staring at the lantern himself with no small supply of frustration. “I’ve no bloody idea, to be honest. All I know is that it’s terribly important, and if I left it here for very much longer, disaster the likes of which this world has never seen would spread across the land like an airbourne fucking plague.”

Dirk’s eyes widened with either frightful surprise or deep-set pessimism at that. He wasn’t sure which himself. He simmered for a few moments before he was able to put his next words together properly.“...how do you know all this shit, Jake?” Well, that wasn’t as elegant as he had planned to say it, but whoops, no time for recrimination now, Paniced!Tired!Annoyed!ScaredoutofhisBalls!Dirk was already steamrolling along, mouth on maximum overdrive. “Who the even fuck are you? I mean shit,” His voice pitched up a little as the absurdity and unending tension of the past half-hour-and-a-bit started to really settle in in his head, the anxiety and panic he usually kept so securely tamped down starting to flare.

“You sneak into pretty much the most secure goddamn building in Byrgenn in the same way an ecchi protag falls into a pair of tits, and after eleven years of wrestling and spamming shitty movies, some weird mystical bullshit thing scares you enough to dress up like a weird, really bright-colored superhero, I guess, and steal some spooky mythical fucking doodad from the goddamn most secure fucking vaults in the most secure fucking building in fucking Byrgenn, and after stashing the damn thing in a honest-to-shit Mary Poppins-ass sack of joy, you sneak up and haul me out of bed to bail you out, I mean,” He was breathing heavily now, almost panting, sweating as he worked himself up more and more. “The fuck even is all this, man? I’d understand if it was my fucking brain cooking up a really convoluted goddamn nightmare, but I think we blew that possibility about five seconds before I blew my goddamn load, I mean-”

Without having noticed him cross the space between them (or put the lantern back into his magic pouch) Dirk found himself interrupted with the warm, rough palm of Jake’s hand pressing gently over his mouth, a concerned and none-too-steady hushing noise sounding from his lips. “Shh, easy now Dirk, easy mate.” He gulped, looking none too easy himself, but trying, really, really trying. “I know it’s scary and weird, trust me, I uh, I super really bloody know that all too frigging well.” Jake gulped again, drier this time, and Dirk realized, not for the first time, that calming other people down was not one of the highest items upon Jake’s interpersonal resume. “But I know what I’m doing Dirk, as much as I’ve royally bungled a lot of aspects of this, I truly do know what I’m about here. I just need you to trust me... just for now, trust me that this is gonna work out alright, okay?”

Dirk hadn’t exactly grown any calmer as Jake spoke, his overactive brain finally allowing (or perhaps forcing) one final, horrible realization to sink in as Jake had spoken. Jake removed his hand from Dirk’s mouth after a few moments, as if to let Dirk assent and have the two of them move forwards, but panicked and alarmed as he was, Dirk could only shake his head tightly, his entire face scruntched up in heartfelt pain. When he spoke, his voice was even more unrecognizable than it had been earlier, tight and forced and strained, and maybe on a good day, on a normal day, Dirk would have been able to keep his cool, would have been able to maintain the air of calmly supreme competence he wore like a second skin most days, but this... this was too much. Even for Dirk, this was too much. “I can’t. Jake I can’t just be okay with this, all this weird bullshit all at once and... and then what? I just help you leave and never see you again? Try and convince myself you haven’t gotten drawn and fucking quartered as I wait for a message on pesterchum that won’t ever come?”

He barely finished the last word, choking it off with what might have been a sob, if you looked really hard at it. This was his worst fear- this was the full, unyeilding reality that a thousand little worries and silent screams had warned Dirk of every time he thought Jake might leave for good over the past decade. It wasn’t a surprise when he felt his cheeks dampen, when his voice became even more ragged, more wretched. “What do you expect out of me, dude?”

It was all he could get out, cutting himself off with a barely stifled shuddering breath. He hated this, hated that he had no idea what was even going on anymore and no control over any of it. Hated that he was having his first full-powered mental breakdown in months at the worst possible fucking time in front of the worst possible fucking person to have it in front of. Hated that he was going to lose his best friend to who the hell knew what, and even if he tried to get Jake to stay, it’d only result in prison and probably a speedy execution for him. Maybe for both of them, Dirk could probably see to that happening if he tried hard enough-

“Dirk...”

His name was called very, very softly, and very, very fondly, and the warmth behind it was the only thing that could have roused Dirk from his misery. His eyes met Jake’s, pain etched in amber gazing desperately into tender affection etched in emerald. Jake reached forwards, rested his hand on Dirk’s cheek just as Dirk himself had done not that long ago and yet so, so far in the past, smiled the same lazy, easy smile Dirk had wore.

“Come with me, Dirk, you great silly pillock. You get yourself so worked up over things...” He snorted a bit, ruefully, his hand slipping down to rest on Dirk’s shoulder. “Well, to be fair that was probably my fault from top to bottom, but still, Strider... I planned from the beginning to ask you along for the ride. I, uhm...” Nervousness colored Jake’s otherwise serene face, and his eyes danced away avoidantly from Dirk’s. “I know full well how much that is to ask of you- would have brought it up much earlier otherwise, but uhm... it is a bit ridiculous of me to ask you to leave your bloody life behind just to wander off in the middle of the night with me. I mean bloody hell, you’re the fucking Prince man, my god, just cause some friendly, lying skiver with a spot of humor and stunning taste in films asks you to drop everything and go doesn’t mean-”

“Yes.”

Jake’s eyes shot back, surprise coloring them at Dirk’s interruption. “Fuck yes. I’ll go with you, no question.” Dirk ran his fingers through his hair, residual tension and worry coming off like static in his blonde locks. “Fuck Jake, anywhere with you is better than a hundred years here or anywhere else.” He realized belatedly how romantic that came out, how genuinely he had just expressed some of his innermost feelings, and Dirk panicked, his face paling as he hurried to find the words to walk it all back, back to safer ground, but Jake’s face was still very close, and Dirk could feel the heat rolling off his skin, and maybe he didn’t need to. They could make a clean start of this, of everything... maybe...

Jake’s smile couldn’t have been brighter as he listened to Dirk speak, and he lunged forwards to wrap his arms around the Prince. “Thank you Dirk. You won’t- er, well, you might actually regret it, several times if I’m honest, but I’ll make every moment of regret worth it ten times over, I promise!”

Dirk smiled unwillingly at that, bright and genuine as he pushed Jake playfully. “At least you’re fucking honest about it, English.”

“I do my darn-diddly-damndest to be, Strider, when I can.” They both stood there for a little bit longer, lingering in the warmth of the moment for as long as they could. It was Jake who eventually broke the silence, looking around the room as he asked Dirk, “So then, where exactly is this secret exit of yours, Dirk?”

Dirk snorted a little at that. He had forgotten he’d been fucking with Jake about that for a minute there. Casually, he lifted his hand, pointed a thumb at the window they were standing next to. “Right here, English. One way trip to freedom, just a pane of glass and a few hundred feet of air between us and a straight shot out of the Royal gardens to the outside world.”

Jake just... stared at the window for a moment, blinking. Deadpan, he turned to Dirk, asked very quickly, “Are you absolutely fucking serious?”

“Mmhm.”

“WE’RE ON THE ELEVENTH FUCKING FLOOR, DIRK!”

“Watch your volume, buddy, and yeah, we are. Just means we take a handful of minutes to scale our way down, and then we’re out.” He smirked, that challenging aura returning, but fully genuine this time. “What, you don’t think you can take it? Years of rough-and-tumble sparring and you think your wrists are gonna give out after scrambling down all the thick fuckin’ buttresses and displaced stoneworks of this shitty castle?”

Jake fairly _growled_ , that simmering frustration that Dirk had always taken great pleasure in setting off starting to show its face. “I’ve got _absolute_ fucking confidence in my ability to climb down a fucking old-as-balls castle wall, my good sir. I’m just shocked that you’ve been doing the same fucking thing for years, apparently.”

Dirk shrugged, casual as can be. “What can I say. I’m just naturally good with tall buildings. Maybe I was a mountain goat in a past life, if past lives were things that were real and not a super fake, tired-ass religious trope that dried up centuries ago.”

“Yeah yeah, wrap it up Aristophanes, let’s get a bloody move on. Jake started to move away from Dirk, towards the window, forcing Dirk to shield his eyes from the sudden return of the light of the oil lamps behind them. He removed his glasses as Jake took a gander at the window itself, rubbing the bridge of his nose until his vision returned and he was able to look at the lights properly again-

And his heart froze. Every drop of blood in his veins, too. He tried to swear, but with his throat still sore and ragged from his episode earlier, all he could manage was a wordless working of his lips and a strangled, terrified noise. Everything else was stuck stock-still.

“Something the matter, old chap?” Jake continued to bustle about next to him, propping the window open, only sparing a glance, then a double-take Dirk’s way when the silence went on for far too long. “Dirk? What’s the matter buddy, what happened?”

His gaze shifted to match Dirk’s own, and Dick could tell the instant his eyes set sight on the tall, crazed looking figure standing in the doorway across from them, Jake’s breath sharp and horrified.

The figure’s head snapped to the side, teeth far too sharp for a human mouth, and far, far too sharp for the mouth of a human Dirk had known since birth, twisting into a rictus-like smile. The man’s hair, typically styled to hell and back, was unrecognizable, disheveled and marred by a suspicious dark-red spattering across the bright blonde. It was almost, almost as disconcerting as the rapidly shifting, blindingly bright unnatural rainbow of lights that shot out of where King Dave Strider’s eyes should have been.

Where the older man should have been holding his royal katana, the King’s hand was instead loosely holding what looked like a garish, gold-plated AK-47, complete with a bright green laser-point scope attachment. Slowly, and yet far too quickly, what once was the King of Byrgenn raised the rifle and pointed it squarely at Jake’s heart.

“ _ **NO!**_ ” Dirk moved faster than he thought possible, lurching to his side to shove Jake out of the way of the shot, and as he moved, the world slowed to a terrifying, horrifying crawl.

Dave’s mouth opened wide, wider than any human’s should, wide enough so that his jaw definitely detached from it’s hinge a good foot or so ago, and from the depths of hell itself, a sick, unholy imitation of his voice croaked out one last message for his little brother.

" _ **G̨ ̢̧̛̛͜A̵̴̢̨ ͏̵̡̕͠M͘͝͠ ̕͜҉͏E̷ ̡̕͢͢O̴̵̢̢͠ ̢͢͢͝V̷̛͢ ͘͞Ȩ͏ ҉̸̢͞R̵̨ ̸̨̢.̵̡̢͟ ̵̷͝.̡͝ ̛̛͘͘͟.̴̡**_ "

The bullets flew, sick, horror-clown laughter mingling with the gunfire, the sounds filling the room, louder and louder and louder-

And then they were in the distance, a dozen dull, wet _thumps_ landing in Dirk’s chest, the impact propelling him through the flimsy glass of the window behind him.

He heard Jake’s voice cry out, loud and terrified, made out the shape of Jake’s body leaping out the window after him as his sight faded.

The world exploded with white, white light, receded into black, black void.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey all! First off, nobody's dead! I am not dead from the year+ absence I've taken from ao3 (sorry, life bs) and Dirk is not dead from the shit that just happened! Well, not permanently dead. Think of it as a Princess Bride, Wesley-after-the-torture-chamber-bullshit-bit sort of situation! Haha! But yeah, this is my first time writing much of anything in a long while, certainly anything this sizable, so if it's shit, or confusing, or weird, apologies! Let me know what you all think, and while I can't promise I'll respond to everything in a timely fashion (anxiety), all will be read and consumed and taken to heart for future writings!
> 
> Some deets about this fic: I have the first four chapters already written, and the first two chapters edited and ready to post at a moment's notice. I will not *be* posting them at a moment's notice, but rather I'm gonna try to post one chapter every week, for as long as I can keep that up. With the backlog that I've got, there shouldn't be any interruptions to this schedule, but hey, it's ao3, I am but a humble fanfic writer, shit happens. BUT, with luck and fortune and lots of hard work, it'll be a chapter every week, every Monday, and hey, guess what, next Monday is 6/12! Wacky how this shit works out.
> 
> Other tidbits; the chapter/fic names are gonna be coming from relevant, sometimes obscure songs from the 80's and earlier, for no real reason other than I thought of some awesome chapter titles based off of songs from that era one night, and decided to go with that for the whole fic, cause why the fuck not, right? The Fic title itself, "Madrigal," is from the Rush song of the same name, and Chapter 1, "I Can Feel It Coming (In The Air Tonight)" is from the Phil Collins song "In The Air Tonight," you know, the one with the cool drum bit and whatnot. 
> 
> Other-Other tidbits; the names of the Kingdoms are sly little allusions to the Alpha Kids' planets themselves. Byrgenn, for example, is an Old English word for "tomb," as in the Land of Tombs and Krypton, Dirk's planet! I'll spill on the etymology behind the other names in later chapters!
> 
> Last tidbits: I am on the internet in various places! If you want to keep up to date on upd8s for this fic (and any other written works of mine), follow me on Twitter [ @7thScribbling ](https://twitter.com/7thScribbling) and on Tumblr at the more wordily titled [seventh-scribbling](http://seventh-scribbling.tumblr.com) and I shall shower you with all sorts of cool, fic-related shit! Also, for what it's worth, my general-posting, multi-fandom, all-bullshit, nothing-that-is-not-bullshit Twitter and Tumblr are [seventh_Tense](https://twitter.com/seventh_Tense) and [seventh-tense](http://seventh-tense.tumblr.com/) respectively!
> 
> See y'all next week! Or, if you're reading this some time in the undetermined future, see you... last week? Spoopy~


	2. Let Me Set The Battlements On Fire

Brief, hazy flashes of imagery and sensation were all that made up Dirk’s memory, for a time.

A bizarrely soothing, white-hot fire pouring out of his chest. A blurry image of the night sky, like a snapshot captured from the backseat of a speeding car. Hundreds of impossibly soft, impossibly gentle hands holding him aloft in the air. The familiar scent of grass and freshly-chopped wood. Humming- not a soothing, relaxed melody, but the percussive, tense vibrations of a familiar voice trying to distract itself from an unfamiliar agony. Woodfire- pinewood, Dirk thinks. Tries to think. Lapses into thoughtlessness, and back out again, countless times. He had learned the differences between the smells of all the different types of trees around Byrgenn once upon a time- even in the strange limbo he found himself floating in now, Dirk had always had a particularly strong affinity with scent-based memory.

Cold, and then a rush of warmth from his side as an immensely comfortable weight settled next to him. The smell of grass at night mingling with drying sweat and skin. Spots of wetness at his shoulder that did not come from him, fits of trembling that did not come from him. Stillness. Quiet. Wind.

Blackness, then memory.

\---

“You absolutely certain about this, English?”

Ahead of you, crouching low to the grass, bare to all the world save for some light tan cargo shorts and a short-sleeve, forest green button-up shirt that was currently tied around his waist, Jake nodded, gesturing you to come closer as he peered over the crest of the hill you two were situated on. “Abso-frigging-lutely, Dirk, trust me, this is going to go over like cheese and crackers on a Sunday afternoon. I mean look at the little beasties, between the two of us we can take ‘em no problem.”

Jake gestured with one of the pistols grasped firmly in his hands towards the scene before you, and as you crept close enough to where he was positioned to look for yourself, you couldn’t help but agree. Before the two of you, in the small forest clearing you had been trekking towards since early dawn, was a small ramshackle encampment filled with a motley assortment of the oddly-shaped skeleton monsters that had been terrorizing travelers and traders’ caravans around these parts of late.The skeletons’ encampment wasn’t much to look at on the face of it. There were a couple of wooden sentry towers around the perimeter of the camp, a bow-wielding skeleton sentry atop each, surveying whatever their dark, empty eye-sockets could magically make out around them. In the middle of the clearing was a modestly-sized campfire and a large, ragged canvas tent, a handful of skeletons meandering about between the two. Overall, about fifteen targets or so, armed well enough to do some damage to your average run-of-the-mill wanderer, but pathetically underpowered in comparison to a Prince of the Kingdom and his favorite Knight.

Knight English. It sounded good. It had been a little over four years since Jake entered into your service as a Page, and a little under fourteen months since his skill as a fighter and aide to you had earned him the more official-sounding and privileged title. You liked it, and you hoped Jake liked it too.

You sighed, shaking your head. “I wasn’t talking about if we could wreck their shit, dude, even if they were fifteen feet tall, decked out in plate armor and double-bladed fucking lightening swords we’d still be serving their asses to them like this was Butler City, Population us two, and they were the Right Honourable Royal Skeleton Delegation from Skeleton Island, fresh off of a grueling three-week skele-journey through wind, snow and hail to reach our awaiting, humble hamlet. It’d be pretty safe to say that those Skeletons were jonesing like nobody’s fuckin business for the freshest possible slice of the famed delicacy of their skele-homeland, and you and me, Butlers Supreme that we are, would already be ferrying them a comically huge, lidded silver tray straight to their eager, drooling jaw bones. Do you know what delicacy would be awaiting them on those trays, Jake?”

“Would ass be a relatively safe assumption, Dirk?” His expression changed, beaming as a thought occurred to him. “Hah, a safe _ass_ -umption!”

“It’d be the safest goddamn ass-umption you ever made in your motherfuckin life, broseph.” Jake giggled in that cheesy, overly-earnest way of his, and you couldn’t help but join in a little. Subtly. You were still a very cool dude, after all, and cool dudes didn’t giggle like schoolyard nerds. Very much. Usually.

At any rate, after a couple moments, you cut the whole affair off with a sigh, mostly directed at yourself. “Okay, I may have let that one get away from me a little. Point is, of course we can kick their asses Jake. I’m just not entirely convinced that this is, quote, _‘An absolutely smashing learning opportunity for the Prince, and a lesson that I shall deliver unto him with the calm, professorial professionalism befitting of one such as yourself, Sire.’_ ” The voice you put on while parroting to him was a deadpan, dead-on imitation of his sprightly, bouncing accent, and it earned exactly the kind of amused-but-I’m-not-gonna-show-it groan from Jake that you had been expecting. “Unquote. Seems to me like this is just an excuse to haul me along on another one of your ‘adventures,’ wouldn’t you say, English?”

Jake paled a little next to you, an embarrassed, slightly desperate grin plastering itself on his face. “Ehehehe... whoopsie? You, uh, caught me red-handed again, Strider! Hoo-hoo, nice, uh, nice catch! Yes!”

You gave him a look, and he quieted. “Chill, dude. I’m as hype as you are for blowing off a day that’d otherwise be spent hunched over in some shitty classroom pouring over treaties and histories and what the fuck ever. Just like to get the record straight before jumping whole-hog into the same boat as you, especially when it involves my best bro straight-up lying to the King’s face.”

Jake sputtered, and you have to cover his mouth with your hand (smearing it with dirt and grass in the process, not that Jake “I bathe in the very dirt, tree leaves my washcloths and the rain itself my combination shampoo and conditioner” English would give a shit) before the force of his chagrined sputtering alerted the whole camp to their position. He calmed quickly, and you removed your hand. “I didn’t bloody well _lie to the King_ , Strider, come on, it was just a sort of-”

“Quote, ‘ _Oh I’ve got a lesson plan and everything Sire. I’m sure a busy, famously punctual gentleman such as yourself woudln’t have the time to go through it, but I’ve mapped out an extensive list of activities and learning goals-''_ ”

“ _ **Alright alright I frigging perjured myself to the frigging King so we could go and kill some frig-blasted skeletons, THERE, I said it, are you happy Strider, does this bring you joy, this admission of guilt, this acceptance of my sins against the very crown itself, hmm?**_ ” Jake was really working himself up into a lather now, hiss-spitting his words at you, his dark skin flushed darker red, his whole body shaking with the effort to keep his volume low enough to not alert their prey. “ _ **Does it please you to wring this confession from me Dirk, does it? D’you got a little stiffy in your friggin knickers from oh, oh plaaaying me soooo hard that I just spill the whole story right in front of you like I’m a goddamned perp on Law and kicking Order? HMM???**_ ”

You were barely holding in your giggles at this point- cool or not, it was still years before you would be able to built up a flawless enough facade of cool disinterest that a patented English-brand Rage-Tirade wouldn’t manage turn the corners of your mouth, despite all your best efforts. You took a deep breath, waved with mostly polite dismissal towards Jake. “Yeah dude, I’m rock fucking hard at milking every last sweet, sweet drop of unpasturized confession juice from your hot, milky word ti- okay, you know what? I’m just gonna stop the wordy bullshit right there. Gonna put an adhesive seal on it, stamp the fucker _Complete and Finished_ and send it on its merry goddamn way.”

Jake nodded, still a little red and steaming, but thankfully having vented the majority of his embarrassed rage. He was smirking a bit himself, actually- you always suspected that Jake kind of enjoyed getting angry as much as you enjoyed the goofy way he expressed his fury, and you quietly tucked the detail away in your mental file cabinet labeled _Shit I Love About Jake Goddamned English_. While you busied yourself with mental clerical duties, Jake turned back to the encampment ahead, muttering a little. “Yeah, probably a good idea, that.”

“Agreed.” you sighed softly, trying to regain some semblance of cool half-seriousness. “But yeah, I really don’t give a shit dude. Just wanted to know for sure if you were fucking with my bro so I could align my story with yours. Make it harder for him to crack us that way, or at the very least if he does manage it, we’ll share the blame and punishment and whatever.”

Out of the corner of your eye, you could see Jake turn to you, a stunned, awed surprise on his face, admiration so clear and unfiltered that you had to look away before he caught you up in whatever sappy schlock was running through his head and got you blushing like a goddamned princess or some shit. That’d be so fucking uncool. It already had been the dozen or so times Jake had managed to make you blush before, as it happened. He scoffed, quietly, the grass rustling about his chin as he shook his head. “I... I’ll be damned if I know what I did to deserve you, Strider. No bullshit, you’re the best fucking friend I could ever hope to find...”

You shake your head a little, just barely managing to keep a level voice as you reply. “Nah dude, ‘s nothing special. Any real bro would do the same thing, every time.” There’s a silence between the two of you, and after a few weighty moments you clear your throat to break it. “Anyways, you think you’re up for killing some evil skeletons? Or, rekilling them, I guess? Whatever.”

Jake chuckled and nodded fiercely towards you, shot a fiery, eager gaze towards the camp below. “Always, my good man, absolutely always. Let’s have at them!”

You both rose to your feet, readying pistols and katana respectively, and charged, a battle cry roaring from your lungs, and as the skeletons turned, almost comically shocked, towards the two of you...

As they turned...

The world receded slowly, slowly into blackness, void, and ice.

\---

For the second time in a row, when Dirk woke up, it was not an easy thing.

This time, however, it was not a passive, pleasant miasma that clouded the young Prince’s mind, but something heavier, stickier and sore, the mental equivalent of a long-unused muscle clumsily flexing and flopping about as it tried to figure out how to frigging function again.

His basic sensory apparatuses were slow to return, but even so returned first to Dirk. Touch was first, the coiling, tired warmth in his body belatedly becoming aware of the fact that it was in the process of being sapped away from Dirk by the icy-cold breeze gusting across his face- but _only_ his face, the familiar heavy weight of what was most likely one of Byrgenn’s standard-issue woolen sleeping blankets draped over the rest of his body. He couldn’t quite tell what was going on beneath him, just that it felt like the softest, most pliant mattress he had ever felt, something that made the obscenely expensive finery back at the Palace feel like wadded-up newspaper and rags.

Faintly, as he worked at getting his eyelids to function, sound returned to him; the breeze from earlier, accompanied by a soft symphony of warm, crisp pops and crackles nearby- check that, _two_ different kinds of pops and crackles. One was unmistakably the ever-familiar soundscape of gently burning firewood, the second... was something else Dirk wasn’t quite certain of. It was familiar, and something about its lighter, more staccato rhythm made a very young and unlearned part of him want to instinctively lurch away from the vague, not-all-that menacing danger the noise represented, but that was about all the detail Dirk’s sense memory was willing to provide on the matter. Something to scribble down and check on later, once his eyelids started responding to his calls.

Scent was, as always, a powerful one as it finally booted up, a wealth of information and detail filling Dirk’s mind and body as he took a breath through his nose, long and slow. Grass was there, not quite accompanied by the wet, faint tang of dew yet, and the smell of burning pine nearby was accompanied by the familiar, brighter sting of some of the logs’ more healthy relatives somewhere farther away. Something tasty mingled with the pine smoke, but beyond that, there was a... it was difficult to describe, really, but the words that came to Dirk’s slowly de-belaugering mind was _alpine_ , just something incredibly alpine overlaying the entire area.

Also gourds. That was the tasty smell, yeah, something really, really _gourdy_. Alright, yeah, Dirk really should get those eyes working now, c’mon, chop chop.

It took a while, and no short supply of concentrated effort, but eventually his eyelids fluttered weakly open, taking in the night sky above his head- a gorgeous sight, filled with about twice as many stars as Dirk was accustomed to seeing, the odd fully-visible and surprisingly vibrant nebulae adding color to what was both an immeasurably beautiful and immeasurably unsettling sight to awake to. Beautiful for the obvious reasons- even when Dirk had gone out for lengthy hunting or camping trips before, he had always stayed relatively close to the well-lit, light-polluting bulk of the capital city, and he had always longed to see an unobscured, pure nights’ sky. Unsettling because it took a _lot_ of distance from any human-produced light to see the depths of space this clearly, implying that Dirk was a hell of a lot farther from home than he probably had ever been before.

Already a little on edge- an edge softened by the majesty of nature, albeit- Dirk began the fight to raise his head far enough to look around, working inch by inch until he was able to, at the very least, prop himself up on his elbows without a fully-orchestrated light show playing behind his eyes. In front of him was a modestly-sized campfire, as he had thought. The bottomost logs of the fire were only barely visible, the bulk of whatever blissful little cloud of goodness he was laying on top of apparently large enough to lift Dirk off of the ground a couple of feet at least. Slowly, slowly he rotated his head to the left, making out the shapes of a sloppily laid-out bedroll, a familiar looking leather pouch, and next to it a larger, slightly fancier bag, something about halfway between a mountaineering backpack and a designer gym satchel, all leather and buckles and drawstrings. To his right, once he got there, sat a large, brass object that looked sort of like a drum, but instead of being topped with hide or leather, a mass of very scientific, very magical-looking spikes and antennae pointed out at every angle. Next to it, closer to the fire, was a small selection of bottles and vials filled with powders and seeds of some sort. Near the mess of containers, closer to the fire itself, was a mess of scattered leaves and greenery and other assorted plant debris.

Another chunk of roughage thudded softly to join its bretheren from above, and a soft _plop_ sound prompted Dirk to look up, only to see the figure of Jake English, hovering in mid-air above the campfire. An array of cookware was spread out before him, also hovering impossibly in the air, all simmering and sizzling (popping and crackling, that must have been what he heard before) as they cooked something- likely slices of the chopped-up pumpkin that was floating next to Jake’s criss-crossed legs.

Floating.

Right.

Out of curiosity, Dirk looked down, moving some of his heavy blankets to one side, and- yep, yeppppp. What felt as light and soft as a feather-shaped cloud beneath him was exactly that, or at least a kissing-cousin to the sky-bound puffballs, i.e. thin fuckin’ air.

He sighed, a dozen dozen more recent memories flooding back at once, and Dirk moved to call out to Jake, get his attention somehow-

Dirk looked down again, he _looked_ down, eyes finally catching the baker’s dozen or so charred holes peppered across his baseball-hat-emblazoned tee. Eyes finally catching the pale, unblemished skin beneath each singed-looking hole. Catching the unhindered movement of his chest as his presumably whole, not-confettified lungs expanded and contracted.

Dumbly, he looked back up at Jake, who was looking back at him now, a Battle Royale of emotions struggling for dominance on his face.

_Oh._

Moments pass. Eventually, Jake’s typical cheerful exuberance seemed to win out over the other, less fun feelings, and he waved towards Dirk excitedly. “Dirk, by Jove, hello, good morning! Well,” He looked up, eyes searching for the moon briefly before giving up with a shrug. “Eh, it’s close enough to morning. And besides which, who really cares, you’ve joined us! And by us I mean me, me and _the night_.”

Jakes arms waggled expansively at that, almost knocking a pot of what Dirk thought was hot oil over with the plastic-tipped spatula he held in his hand. Dirk sighed, opened his mouth to speak-

“Well, hah, I say _the night_ , that really could be interpreted as far more ominous and cool than it really is- just me here, really, me and you and my _stuff_ , my assorted stuffs and thingamabobs, ‘s all that’s really here. I mean, yeah, okay, there’s more shit _here_ , there’s wild animals and bears and mountain lions and whatever the rough, bleeding shit those weird bipedal pig-like motherfuckers are that sometimes just sorta wander about the forests like it’s a friggin’ thing to do, they _exist_ , they’re _out there_ , it’s just-”

“Jake.”

“-no, sorry, got off on a tangent there, you’re right. Point is, Strider, yes, they’re out there, but nobody with a healthy, snappy head on their shoulders, such as the two strapping gents in the immediate proximity of this lovely, toasty fire here, have any reason to worry about them whatsoever. I’ve set up my mystical, pointy-bucket thingamabob over there, and from what I know it basically is constantly screaming at sub-audible levels in every animal language to stay the fuck away in nasty, threatening tones. I think it projects a big dome of dragon-scented something or other around us too, just in case the scurrying scallywags in yonder trees and meadows get a touch cocky, a touch too big for their non-existant britches you might say-”

“ _Jake_.”

“Ah, yes, you’re quite right Dirk my man, my boy, my pernicious studmuffin.” He paused for a moment, looking straight ahead blankly, then shook his head. “Yeah, okay, ignore that last one, getting a bit weird but a lack of sleep will do that to a man- and, more to the point I was attempting valiantly to get to, a lack of food as well! I’ve got some spiced pumpkin here in a handful of styles, I actually-”

“ ** _Jake_**.”

He quiets, finally, his words stuttering into silence with a small, nervous noise as he turns to look at you properly. “Y-yes Dirk?”

Dirk takes a deep breath, lets it out slowly. “Just... shut up for a second, okay? I get that you’re...” He trails off, lips quirking in annoyance. “Actually, I don’t get jack shit right now, which is kind of the point. I can’t keep up, man, everything’s just...”

Again, words seemed to slip away from Dirk even as he tried to grasp at some way to describe how badly he was failing to grasp them, or anything, right now. “What the fuck happened, Jake? I mean, shit dude, you’re sitting here fucking _floating_ -” A bit of a hysterical laugh slipped out there, and Dirk had to pause for a few seconds to calm his racing thoughts, his racing heart. “I just... I need answers, Jake. I need answers en masse and quicker than a... whatever, something real fuckin’ quick, I’ve got nothing right now dude, like...”

There was silence for a moment, and part of Dirk wondered if his atypical show of weakness- his second one in a row, he realized, memories of his episode in the Castle storeroom flooding back into his head- had just managed to push Jake away, disillusion him and scare him off like Dirk had always feared he would, were he ever to slip up. A few, horrifying moments passed before Jake sighed and, seeming to focus for a bit, floated back down to sit on his bedroll, the various cookware and vegetables he had been using finding their way to a small slab of stone nearby. He took a deep, slow breath, then turned to Dirk, an expression that shouted _‘I‘m really not calm at all, but I‘m trying super hard to be, so for the sake of this conversation and my sanity, let‘s both pretend that I‘m calm and collected and everything is fine,‘_ splayed on his face. “Where would you like me to start first, old boy?”

Dirk turned, looked at Jake helplessly. Jake seemed to take the hint.

“Right. Well,” he started, a little emotionally muted. “I’m magic, as you’ve probably, uh, gathered by now. A wizard, I guess? Magic-wielder? I genuinely don’t know the proper term for it, I was only really taught _how_ to use my abilities and that just barely, not, erm, how to think of them, I suppose. I can do basic wizardly shit, levitate things, mess with the elements, craft some basic illusions, that sort of thing, and, erm, as I recently discovered,” he gestures to Dirk. “Apparently my particular skillset is capped off by being able to revive the...” he trailed off, mouth working without any sound, and had to clear his throat kind of violently in order to get his vocal cords working again. “...uh, revive the dead, and also set off a bloody huge explosion when in particularly desperate emotional straits, ahaha...”

He trailed off, but Dirk really didn’t have anything to say yet, so after a few moments, Jake continued, stumblingly. “Yes, well, uhm... like I said back at the castle, I don’t actually hail from Byrgenn, or, erm, from anywhere else, really. We’re heading to my- well, I wouldn’t call it a _home_ , but it’s as close to that as I get- but, erm, yes, we’re heading there now. It’s really just a, uhm, stupidly large sort of tower-like thing in the, uhm...” He shook his head. “Honestly, describing it is just gonna make things more confusing at this point. Safe to say, the first mountain we get to, there’s a cave halfway up the slope that leads to this bigass, hollowed-out cavern, and that’s home-sweet-home for me.”

He scratched at his hair, eyes drifting towards the food slowly cooling nearby- when Jake floated everything back down to earth before, he must have levitated the pumpkin out of the cookware too, a full gourd’s worth of slices arrayed now on a large silver serving tray he had gotten out from... somewhere? The tray was pretty fucking huge, but then, Dirk remembered, that lantern thing Jake had pulled out of his magical pouch thing had been pretty big too. How many things could he even fucking fit in there?

“Dirk, uhm...” Perhaps Jake could sense how tense Dirk was getting, could sense the gap that was growing between them with every passing moment, because his voice doubled in nervousness quite quickly, almost as low in pitch as Dirk’s. “Look, I know you pretty well, buddy, and even if you don’t think you do right now, you know me inside and out too. Which, erm, which is to say, that I know you’re probably really, really pissed at me right now-”

“Not pissed, Jake,” Dirk interrupts softly, tiredly. “Just... kinda freaked out, I guess? I thought...”

Jake sighed, self-disgust coiling in the air that shot from his lungs. “I know you did, Strider, I know it... mate, all I can do is tell you the truth and hope you understand why I kept my trap so heinously shut about it all these years. I mean it’s not like I had any reassurance that someone with magic wouldn’t just be summarily burned at the stake or whatever if they were discovered- kicking christ, I don’t even bloody know if there are any other people with magic to set a precedent like that around here.” He was scratching at his hair, hand moving too fast with nerves. “I didn’t know if you’d panic, I didn’t know if it’d weird you out, and I certainly didn’t know how to say that I was given a gods-damned ‘ _imperitive, world-saving mission_ ’ or whatever the fuck without coming off like an absolute loon... It just seemed easier and better for everyone to just... not.”

“What mission, Jake?” Dirk’s voice is flat, and a little unkind, as much as half of him really, really wants to give his childhood friend the benefit of the doubt here. “Getting that lamp thing? Is that why you came to Byrgenn from Mount Whateverthefuck, to cozy up to me so you could nab that thing and get out with a useful hostage to negotiate with in case you were caught-”

“NO!” The force of Jake’s shout hit Dirk in the gut, the growing panic inside him stunned into silence. “Gods and Goddesses above, Dirk, no! I joined up with the castle guards so I could nab the lantern quick and easy and be done with it, sure, but that was _eleven frigging years ago_. Come on, Strider, I know you’re a terribly paranoid son of a dignified but hereditarily mentally ill canine, but you’re the smartest man in the frigging world, you can figure out what that means!”

Dirk thought for a moment, trying, trying to come up with a reasonable answer, free of suspicion and fear that the best relationship in your life had been a goddamned lie. “You... got distracted?”

“I-” Jake sighed sharply, shook his head. “That’s not the most charitable way to put it, chap, but... yes, I suppose you could say that. More accurately, I met _you_ , you great, sodding sack of nonsense.” He paused, his face contorted with emotion. His voice was softer when he continued. “I met the first person I had ever flipping known that seemed to be interested in me. That might care for me- that does care for me, I’ll be so very bold as to say, Dirk. I made a _friend_ , and I would have put whatever sodding mission I got in that lonely fucking tower aside til I was six feet under if it meant more peaceful days with you, Strider.”

 _So why didn’t you_ , a part of Dirk, that voice that barely registered as human quipped caustically from within. He quieted it. Dirk had never been able to really, truly cry as long as he could remember, but his voice sounded as if he had sobbed for hours when he spoke again. “...could... could I have some of that pumpkin?” A racking cough rolled through his body as Dirk tried to sit the rest of the way up. “Fuck. Some water too, if you’ve got it...”

Jake nodded silently, knowing as well as Dirk that the conversation wasn’t over yet, but obviously needing a break just as badly, considering the way his breath shuddered as he spoke. “Yeah, sure mate, no worries. Here, let me just...”

He crawled over to where the pouch and satchel lay on the grass nearby, and pulled the small pouch open unnaturally wide again, the sight of the magic doing something very weird to Dirk’s stomach that made him look away for a minute. The sound of water hitting glass drew his attention back, though, and he found Jake holding a surprisingly fancy-looking carved-glass cup, pouring water into it from a thermos he had retrieved from within the bottomless bag’s depths. Gingerly, he passed it to Dirk, and he and Dirk twitched at the same time when their fingers touched, the brush of skin against skin like molten metal. Dirk quickly took the cup with a tight nod of thanks.

Jake turned back to rummage through the bag as Dirk slowly chugged the whole thing, pulling out a couple of decently-sized ceramic plates from within, idle chatter starting to trickle out from his lips again. “I tried to cook up the pumpkin slices a couple different ways- didn’t have enough shit to make the teriyaki glaze like I wanted, but I found some spare oil and what have you stashed away in here, so I thought to myself, next best thing, let’s tempura the fuckers and see how it goes.” Hesitantly, first trying to levitate the pieces over before he thought better of it and just moved to pick them up manually, Jake started loading up a plate for Dirk. “Other than that, we’ve got your traditional salt-and-pepper, a nice sorta sugar-glazed jim-jeroo to tease at your sweet tooth, and one where I just grabbed whatever spices and oils and shit that looked tasty to me in the moment and tossed it all together, haha...”

Laden now with two of each kind of slice, and four of the tempura-fried ones, Jake handed the plate over to Dirk, a shaky attempt at a smile trying to make an appearance on his lips. “Wanted t’welcome you back to the land of the living in style, you know. Hope there’s something you like, eheh....”

Shame burned in Dirk like an oilfire as he took the plate. He... no matter the occasion, even as heightened and completely unexpected as this one was, Dirk always managed to one-up himself in assholeishness. Jake went to all this trouble, and here he was... he took another sip of water, swallowing the shame away to deal with later. “Thanks, Jake,” he managed.

“‘s my pleasure Dirk, don't worry ab-”

“No, seriously,” Dirk reached out with his free hand, grasped Jake’s forearm as the other started to draw away. The scared flinch in Jake’s muscles as they touched hurt, but the sting only served to strengthen Dirk’s resolve. Jake was, at this point, probably the only ally Dirk had, depending on how he interpreted those last, terrifying moments in the Castle. More importantly though, no matter what the situation was in Byrgenn, no matter what happened at any point in their lives, Jake had always stood by Dirk. Had always believed in him, and Dirk wasn’t going to fuck this up yet, damn it. Suspicions or not, fears or not, no matter how staggeringly, pitifully small and petty Dirk’s heart was, at its core, Dirk had always believed in Jake back.

There was a chasm between them now, yes, one that neither man could forge. But given time, Dirk and Jake both knew they’d build a bridge across it. They always had before, they would here too.

Dirk looked up at Jake, an honest, genuine smile joining his gaze. “Thank you, Jake.”

His features softened, melted like butter as Jake grasped the weight and scope of the statement. His joviality quickly reappeared though, mask sliding up not out of uncertainty, now, but embarrassment, brushing the thanks aside as he thwapped Dirk’s shoulder jocularly. “No need to look so serious, Strider, it’s just pumpkin bits, not a poached friggin faberge egg or what have you.”

Dirk slid his own cool, faux-disinterested mask up in turn, quipping back dryly. “I _was_ willing to overlook that particular lapse in judgment, English, but since you brought it up, what _were_ you thinking, exactly, serving grilled and fried _pumpkin_ to a Prince of the realm. Did you honestly think I’d deign to sully my precious mouth with such low, base commoner’s food, hmm?”

Jake snorted, loading up his own plate now. “Considering how Your Highness is a bit of a low, base, common weeaboo yourself, I did actually think that old-world Japanese-style cuisine might dampen your royal panties a smidgen, as it happened. But oh, perhaps I was a touch too bold in assuming such absurd assumptions, Your Grace, Your Honor, Your Lordship~”

It was nearly impossible to fight off the grin spreading across Dirk’s features, tinged as it was with relief and release at the return of their familiar banter, so he didn’t bother trying, and let loose a rough chuckle as he gingerly picked up one of the crisp, fried slices. He tried a bite, teeth cutting through the surprisingly soft meat of the vegetable like it was cake, and played with it curiously on his tongue as he chewed, his eyebrows shooting up in surprise. “No bullshit though, dude, this is fucking delicious.”

Jake looked exceedingly pleased at the praise as he scarfed down his own share of the meal, mouth full as he replied. “Very pleased to hear it, old boy!”

Dirk shook his head, still amused at how charming Jake could be even as he was being an absolute gross mess. They ate in companionable silence for a few moments, before Dirk asked curiously, “Why pumpkin, though?”

Swallowing his mouthful of gourd quickly, Jake nodded as he tried to explain, only choking a bit on what was probably a barely-chewed bite. “Mmm, yes, good question. It’s a stupid answer, but in addition to the other assorted mystical magical whogivesashit I’ve got in my sneaky bag of tricks, I can summon pumpkins!”

There was silence, for about half a minute, then Jake sighed. “Yeah, that sound fucking idiotic. Look, I can control the elements, right? Fire, water, wind, big, honking globs of loamy sand and sandy loam, all that jazz.” Dirk nodded, slowly, not sure where Jake was going with this. “Well, from what I’ve learned, I’m not so much, like, creating a gout of fire from nothing but the palm of my hand, or- or the water, the water in that jug, that’s a good example. Like, I poured all the water in that jug myself, it all came from me, right?”

Dirk very, very slowly turned to the glass of water by his side, raising an eyebrow at it. He opened his mouth to speak, only to be cut off by a disgusted sigh and a dismissively waggling hand from Jake. “Ugh, god damnit Strider, yes, haha, very funny, the water came from me, insert obligatory pee joke here, applause, applause, applause, you live for the applause-plause, live for the applause-plause, et **_frigging_ ** cetera. Any other smarmy little jokes you wanna make here, before I continue with my deep, fascinating explanation of advanced metaphysical mechanics, hmm???”

Dirk shook his head, smirking hard. “Nah, you pretty much covered it, English. Do go on.”

Jake rolled his eyes hard enough to tear a retina, snorting. “Thanks _terribly_ for the permission, Your Four-Twenty Highness. Anyways, as I was _attepmting_ to say, I didn’t actually make all that water out of nothing. I drew it from somewhere and if you fucking say anything even _approximating_ ‘did you draw it from your bladder’ I will impale you with this slice of gourd, Strider, don’t even try me.” Dirk’s whole upper body was shaking at this point, trying valiantly as he almost always ended up doing when chilling with Jake, struggling to keep his laughter under control. He waved for his friend to continue, catching the mischievous smile playing around Jake’s lips as he did so. “Right. Well, basically what seems to happen is that when creating this sort of stuff, I draw the element out into our dimension from some other, parallel world or some such. There’s a whole bookcase of tomes back in the tower on the subject that go into it a lot more eloquently than that, and tragically gentle, confused 11-year-old Jake couldn’t understand a lick of it when he first tried to parse the bloody thing, but basically, that’s how it works. Snap my lil’ ol’ fingers, and from Dimension X or what have you, a gust of wind come seeping through into our realm, and so forth.”

Dirk nodded, halfway through one of the glazed slices now as he listened. “What does all that have to do with our dinner, though? You trying to say that the 5th element of the world isn’t light or darkness or weird auteur sci-fi movies, but some vast, mysterious pumpkinverse?”

Jake shrugged, his face smooshing with his shoulders. “Damned if I know any of that deeper shit on the matter Dirk, who fucking knows. I personally think it’d be quite smashing if there was a pumpkin-based realm beyond our own, don’t you?”

“I’m gonna try really hard to ignore that pun, Jake, but you’re not makin’ it easy for me.”

“What pun?”

Not wanting to get into another tangent on shitty old-world bands Dirk listened to for purely ironic purposes, he waved the question aside. “Never mind. You were saying?”

Jake looked puzzled for a moment, then shrugged again and continued. “Yes, well, point is, whenever I try to summon any type of food, it always ends up being a pumpkin! Damned if I know why, but whatever aetherial presence there is that’s responsible for hearing my commands and producing a magical result right quick, every word in the English language there is for food and all various and sundry types of food there are seem to translate into magic-speak for pumpkin. Who knew?”

Dirk raised his eyebrows in surprise. Who knew indeed? Not fuckin’ him, that’s for damn sure. Honestly, the more Jake talked and tried to explain things, the more questions he brought up at the same time, and the part of Dirk’s mind that on no uncertain terms had to know everything, all the time, down to the finest detail was voraciously demanding that he press Jake for more answers, growling at Dirk from the depths of his psyche like a drooling, snarling beast.

But the food was good, and the company was nice, and from what it sounded like there was still a long trek left between where they were now and Jake’s Tower. There’d be time for the rest of the answers later.

Dirk tossed the hostile, caustic voices in his brain a slice of tempura-fried pumpkin and a little ramekin of soy sauce, and enjoyed the rest of his meal. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter's title is taken from the song "Fortress Around Your Heart," by Sting, which isn't an incredibly obscure 80's song exactly, but it's such a perfect one for Dirk and Jake lyrically-speaking that I might take more chapters from it, if/when the mood becomes relevant again. 
> 
> I might as well say this now, but a fair amount of this fic was inspired in no small part by the recent Zelda game Breath of the Wild, as far as what the scenery and monstery-baddies look like in my head, and this chapter holds the first example of that, namely the skele-monsters that Dirk and Jake take on in the flashback scene (Cursed Bokoblins), and the pig-like monsters Jake mentions in his nervous little ramble later on (Normal Bokoblins)! It'll be a while before there are more explicit references, but for those of you who have played, the lush scenery of Nintendo's most recent classic is what plays in my mind at least as Dirk and Jake scamper throughout this fic.
> 
> See you folks next Monday! Oh, and Happy 6/12~


	3. I'm Over My Head, Is It Day or Night

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings now for the first bit of descriptive, vaguely gore-y nastiness in this fic. It isn't like a written version of fucking SAW XVIII: THE RESAWENING or anything like that, but it is a little icky, and I know *I'd* be a little squicked out by it if I didn't know it was coming ahead of time, so here's a warning for all of you who are like me in that regard.
> 
> Enjoy!

A Secret, Dirk was beginning to learn, was really just the conceptual version of a big, old, sentient dam. A naturally grumpy entity, unwillingly imbued into cement and steel, forced into keeping tonnes upon tonnes of pressure locked up and hidden away, but oh, oh so willing to instantly crumble into a thousand million pieces when given the slightest opportunity, its spirit rocketing forth into the world from the force of the release, curling, coiling, writhing along with the currents until it spread out over the whole of the world, all gratitude and long-awaited peace.

Or, in other words, it was now a few hours after Dirk had decided to trust and believe in Jake- to, in an increasingly mixed series of metaphors, stand as far as he could out into the river that ran between them now, arms outstretched, (as they always had been for Jake, as they always would be) and wait until Jake was good and ready to ford out into his side and meet him. This all must have shown in Dirk’s face, somehow, because as soon as dawn broke and the two of them had finished packing up their campsite, as soon as, perhaps, Jake caught a glimpse of Dirk’s face in the full light of the morning sun and saw how genuinely peaceful and at ease he was, (how genuinely peaceful and at ease he was working so fucking hard to be) Jake had on his own accord started talking all about his magic, his powers, his past and he had not. Stopped. Talking. Since.

Operation Break The Dam: Succ-fucking-cessful, apparently.

It was in fits and starts, admittedly- the thing about secrets that fucked with the dam metaphor from earlier was that after being still and silent and secluded away from the rest of the world for so long they forgot how to exist in motion, in communication. Well, okay, Dirk _could_ find a way to make that work with the dam metaphor, he was Dirk Strider after all, Prince of Bullshit. Maybe make the truth-water behind the dam was sentient too, or a living creature or some shit like that, and Dirk could put in something about muscle atrophy or whatever the fuck, but his brain was still addled from a day and a half (or so Jake had told him) of death-and-then-revival-magic-induced sleep.

So fuck the indirect shit. Jake was clumsy and didn’t always finish his thoughts and very obviously had no practice in talking about this kind of personal stuff, but god damn that really didn’t seem to stop the dude from talking anyways.

Dirk thought it was cute, and only teased Jake about it when he was really, really asking for it.

For the most part, Jake had been chattering away non-stop ever since he began, but every so often he would lapse into a brief silence, either because for the moment he had ran out of things to say, or just due to having to stop and catch his breath at _some point_ , Dirk guessed. Either way, the pauses gave Dirk opportunities to collect his thoughts on what he had been hearing and try to milk some more specific answers out of his friend.

“So,” Dirk queried idly during one of those pauses, fingers fidgeting idly with the smooth cloth lining inside his pockets. Jake had lent him a heavy winter coat, rummaging around inside the depths of that magical Rucksack of Holding of his just as they had been about to set off earlier, before pulling out the long, puffy, dark green affair, hangar and all. It was ankle-length, felt like a weird country-bumpkin cousin to the Trenchcoat and Parka families, and was very, very warm. It also, Dirk quickly discovered, had very smooth, silky pockets that were excellent for fiddling with. Dirk loved it, and wished fervently that Jake could magic up a duplicate in black and orange. “Mister English, Boy Wonder, user of unpredictable magic powers, bosom-buddy to provincial royalty, a walking nightmare to evil, wild monsters swathed in green and sometimes a kinky kind of goldenrod outfit, apparently?”

Jake rolled his eyes loudly- not that his eyes made noise as they rotated, but Jake’s amused brand of ire was the kind that everybody in hearing range was aware of as soon as it made its presence known, typically. He wasn’t a subtle boy. “For what it’s worth, Strider, I’m not the most massive fan of that outfit either. ‘s a bit too much like Laura Croft’s wardrobe fucked one of those Old World Keebler Elves, if you’ll pardon the mental image.” Both men shuddered a second after Jake spoke, neither pardoning a single damn iota of having been forced to imagine that nightmare.

Jake shook it off first. “Anyways, was all that buildup leading to a question, or...?”

Dirk hummed assent. “Sorry, yeah, I was gearing up to ask you about your origin story, so to speak. Thus the whole vaguely comic-book-style opener. But yeah, how’d you start off in all this, Jake? Mentioned growing up in some mountainous, Rapunzel-ass tower or whatever, but like, did you have parents, or was it just tiny baby Jake Rugratting around for a dozen years?” The corners of Dirk’s lips turned downwards at the idea of his last proposed origin for Jake. Almost half of Jake’s entire lifetime, completely on his own save for some books he probably couldn’t read and a shitton of pumpkins, assuming he could even summon those at an early age... that’d be a pretty fucked up way to grow up. Dirk didn’t think he’d be able to do it, if it were him... he liked his privacy, sure, but growing up in total isolation? That’s not the sort of thing a person comes out of without being pretty seriously fucked up, and that’s if they’re lucky.

Jake was smiling though, when Dirk’s attention caught on him again, which was probably a sign that his background was a lot less shitty than Dirk had been imagining. “Nice try, Dirk, but as it happens, I hail from behind door number three, in this situation- or I suppose in less archaic referential terms, none of the above.”

Dirk let one of his almost imperceptible smirks twitch onto his face. “Bro, I have an almost encyclopedic knowledge of pre-phlogistic media and shit based off of it, I got it. If you weren’t born or raised in this mysterious, probably phallic place of residence we’re marching towards, then what?”

The mention of phallic imagery seemed to sour Jake’s expression as he started to answer, and he had to take a second to shake that off before continuing. “Right, right, well Strider, it’s... kind of weird, honestly.”

“Pretty much guessed that it’d be already, English.”

Another roll of the peepers at that.“Ten points and a cookie to you, then. Seriously though, I can’t say I understand it myself, but I just sort of... woke up there? One day?”

Dirk... frowned at that, and he would have voiced his confusion pretty strongly had Jake not been mirroring his expression almost exactly. He decided to wait for Jake to gather himself and continue.

Thankfully, it didn’t take very long. “Yes, well... you mentioned Rapunzel, earlier, but this is gonna be a lot easier if you kinda mash up the old girl’s living situations with the situations of our dear Princess Aurora, sort of? Like, not exactly, there was no witch or weird, hyper-archaic curse involving whatever the bleeding fuck a 'spinning wheel’ is, without ever explaining why a wheel that spins would be something that you could even possibly prick your finger on, like, that doesn’t make a lick of fucking sense, honestly, even for a goddamned Disney flick that’s a pretty stupid plot device.”

Curiosity biting at his heels as it was, Dirk’s amusement at Jake’s... Jake-ness won out, as it always did. “Pretty sure that shit was based on some ancient myth from like, a couple hundred years before that movie was even made, dude.”

Jake sniffed, still peeved. “Well they should have thought it out a bit better back then, hm? Not much use making a world-famous fairy tale if it’s just gonna become outdated within a handful of years or so.” Dirk would have snarked more at that, but it was obvious that Jake was just being obtuse purposefully, trying to get another rise out of Dirk, so he didn’t give the sassy faux-Brit the satisfaction. Jake sighed, then got back on topic. “Anyways, my point in bringing that shit up in the first place is that I, uhm... well, you know that weird sort of altar-kinda thing that Aurora was all konked the fuck out on when Prince Whatever the Utterly Forgettable Fuck gave her the ol’ non-consensual smootch of life? I basically just... woke up, on something very much like that, one day.”

That... seemed to be the end of the story??? No, fuck that, Dirk was not letting that be the end of the story. “You just... woke up? On a weird, golden altar?”

Jake groaned, pressing his hands against his face. “I don’t know? Sort of??? Like, it was less of an altar proper and more like this weird sort of biomechanical pad that totally _looked_ like stone but totally _wasn’t_ stone, and it was all recessed into what I think was some sort of tub? I’ve really got no idea, it was all very freaky and weird and I still don’t understand it... ugh!”

This really seemed to be upsetting Jake, and Dirk put a hand on Jake’s shoulder, both to gently halt their march forwards and to pass on a reassuring squeeze. “Easy dude. Just... take it slow, okay? Take it from the top.”

He whimpered a little, but nodded, taking a very deep breath and only letting his hands drop from his face as he slowly let it trickle back out. “Right. Right. Okay. So, my tower, right? Don’t know if it has a proper name, wish it did, but... my tower. The very top floors are all reserved for bedrooms of various shapes and kinds, most of ‘em I never paid much mind to, don’t really remember what they looked like, but uhm, yeah, mine was up there too. Big ol’ room too, it was, four-poster bed and a whole squadron of dressers and tables and cabinets and bookshelves and couches, real ritzy stuff. Anyways, off to one side is this big, spooky-looking door, and behind that is a sorta bathroom-sized room, I guess? It’s pretty unassuming, some light fixtures, tile floor, and in the center is this... tub, I guess you’d call it. Sort of like someone raised a big, perfectly rectangular chunk of rock straight up from the ground, then sunk another rectangular bit in the middle back down to ground level, for no apparent reason. My guess is that it was filled with some sort of weird, magical liquid or whatever to keep me all a-slumbering and whatnot, but it was dry as a bone by the time I woke up.”

Dirk nodded, slowly. He’d have to wait and see on whether his mental approximation of Jake’s room was accurate, but he was pretty sure he had the tub-altar-thing down pat. “Think I’ve got the idea, yeah. So you... woke up in the tub?”

He got a snicker at that. It always felt nice to make Jake laugh. “You say it that way, makes me sound like I passed out dead-drunk in the thing the night before. But more or less, yeah. There I was, all of what, eleven, maybe? Nothing but an old, long pair of bathing trunks to my name, no memory to speak of whatsoever, eyes blinking open, back flush against the stony-but-not-stone bottom of a weird-ass pseudo tub. Pretty weird way to start a life, wouldn’t you say?”

 _Yeah I’d fucking say so,_ that snarky, jackass voice in the back of Dirk’s mind quipped. But.. it wasn’t wholly off from how he actually felt. This was some weird shit, and as hard as he had been trying to keep thinking of Jake just as his best friend of a decade plus, only with a bit more backstory than he previously thought, this... this was kind of pushing it, a little. “Yeah...”

Jake didn’t seem to notice how off Dirk was feeling, or if he did notice it, he ignored it for the moment. “Now, I couldn’t tell you if I was some weird test-tube-tub baby that was grown there, or if someone actually did put me in some Aurora-ass stasis-sleep or what have you. I’ve wondered about that bit quite frequently, but all the book said- there was a book waiting on a sort of pedestal nearby, you see, all opened to a page with a little, cursivey note waiting for me- but yes, all the book said was some grandiose nonsense that boiled down to ‘Hey, welcome back to the land of the living! Had a nice nap? Super coolio, popachops! Now, off on your bike, plenty more obtuse tomes left to stuff your brain stem with before your super awesome Mission of Destiny or whatever the fuck starts off in earnest!’ It was utter bullshit, super unhelpful.”

“Huh.” Dirk really wasn’t capable of much more than that at the moment. There was a lot of new information to sift through, and when it came to totally new information, Dirk could be a pretty slow, very thorough sifter. “I guess I’ll get to see all this shit in person pretty soon, anyways.”

There was a flash of movement in Dirk’s peripheral vision as Jake replied. “Heh, not as soon as you might think, sadly. We’re still a good four or so-”

The next few moments happened very slowly, but also very, very quickly.

A loud, inhuman screaming pierced through Jake’s calm ramblings first, the scream coming from very, very nearby. Both Dirk and Jake turned towards the source of the noise, hands going for their weapons- except Dirk’s hands came up empty, Jake hadn’t been able to find Dirk’s sword, it was probably still lying somewhere around the Byrgenn Castle grounds.

He swore viciously, before his attention was caught by something that made him swear twice as fervently; the screaming had been coming from the disgusting, gaping mouth of one of the bipedal pig-monsters that infested the wilderness of the Continent like rats, like very organized, very violent, well-armed rats, that for some reason seemed to see unarmed-looking travelers or caravans as the tastiest goddamn cheese this side of the Andromeda Galaxy.

The monster was already in the air, leaping straight towards Dirk, its stubby, clawed fingers gripped around a makeshift axe- more of a hefty stick with a bunch of sharp-looking bones strapped to it, but Dirk had seen enough mauled, mutilated victims of similar attacks to know that it would more than do the trick. Adrenaline was still diluting Dirk’s perception of time enough for his mind to run through what he could do- after stopping for a brief millisecond to berate him thoroughly for letting his guard down this badly.

A split-second later, Dirk had started to throw himself out of the way, years and years of rigorous combat training guiding his body into a roll that would end up with him back on his feet, ready to fight for his life. His eyes flicked between the arc of the monster’s axe and his own body- Dirk might still get nicked a little by the weapon, but with luck it’d get caught up in the tail of the thick longcoat he had borrowed from Jake, at least enough to dull or maybe even deflect the path of the blow.

He didn’t get a chance to find out.

Dirk met the ground, pain-free, aside from the natural jarring ache that came from a rough meeting with the solid earth, and without so much as a scratch on his lower half marring the action, he rolled back to his feet, turning towards the threat.

...only to find the pig-monster frozen completely in place.

Literally, frozen in place. Its rough, sickly-green hide was now wholly encased in ice- all of it was, actually. From its head to its toes, all covered in thick, solid ice- the only exception, actually, was the axe Dirk had taken such notice of a moment before.

Dirk’s mouth hung open, and his eyes searched for Jake, only to find him hovering a meter in the air on the other side of the beast, hand outstretched towards it, palm flat, a faint wisp of icy mist curling away from his fingertips.

Time returned to its normal state as Dirk stared. Jake, unburdened with shock or surprise, simply let himself fall back down to the earth, looking very satisfied with himself. “Well, what a rude fucking creature,” he quipped, his voice rough with exertion. “Still, nice to be able to take on the little beastie without holding myself back. Now then.”

Jake took a couple steps forwards and grabbed the non-frozen handle of the monster’s weapon. He tore it from the beast’s grip, and if Dirk hadn’t been hunting the fuckers since he could hold a sword, he’d have winced as the monster’s hand came off with it, still clutching the handle. Jake grimaced in distaste, and, raising the weapon high, sent the makeshift blade straight through the beast’s frozen neck.

There wasn’t any blood as the grotesque head left its grotesque former place on its grotesque former neck- Jake’s ice blast must have frozen it completely through. Holy shit.

“Holy shit,” Dirk said, awed.

“Quite so.” Jake was _very_ satisfied with himself, but somehow that didn’t manage to shake Dirk out of his revere. Jake noticed _that_ , at least, and clapped Dirk on the shoulder a couple of times, which did the trick. “Come on mate, let’s make tracks. I doubt this motherfucker was hunting in a pack, but best not to take any risks.”

Dirk nodded, turning to follow Jake as he started to walk a bit faster than before. “Not that they’d be much of a threat, apparently.”

Jake seemed to miss the.... unsettled parts of Dirk’s tone, or if he did notice it, he ignored it. (Dirk could see the corners of his mouth tightening for an instant before he spoke. He definitely was ignoring it.) “Damn right.”

Jake tossed the axe into the grass at their feet, and the two men marched on.

\---

It was about an hour later before Dirk got enough of his nerve back to speak up again. Well, rather it was an hour before A) he could craft his question and tone in a casual-enough-sounding manner to not make Jake think he was as freaked out as he really was, and B) his freaked-out mind stopped repeating a Top Ten Hits playlist of his new, rejuvinated fears, featuring such smash hits as _He Could Have Won Any Scrum or Fight We Ever Had If He Chose,_ and _My Best Friend Could Easily Kill Me Right Now If He Wanted To And I’d Never Even Know It Was Coming_.

Once he managed to stuff all that down far enough, Dirk spoke.

“Okay, so riddle me this, Batman. You can float, you can go full fuckin’ Last Airbender on us with the elements, got some sorta telekinesis thing going on... 's there anything you can’t do? Like, what are the limits to all this shit?”

Striding next to Dirk as they crossed a wide, frost-laden, grassy plain, Jake hummed, stroking his chin. He didn’t comment on the lengthy silence that had hung between them before the question, but to be fair, Dirk and Jake had been friends for years, and it had been a long, long time since either man had felt he had to fill every moment with conversation. “Quite the interesting question you posited there, my good bro... first off, the levitation and telekinesis businesses are pretty much the same thing, only difference is I either focus the magic on myself or on something else. But, ah, as to your query, I’m... not sure?” He shot an unsteady grin towards Dirk, the embarrassment that the expression accentuated doubling when it was met only with Dirk’s signature stony impassivity. “I’ve, uh, I’ve experimented with it all a fair amount in the past, of course- give a man a couple isolative years in a big-ass tower, throw in some magic whooshy-zooshiness and he’ll start experimenting all over the bloody place.”

Jake blushed as soon as he said that, for some reason, the now deep-red flush on the typically lighter skin at the tips of his ears the only evidence of his apparent embarrassment, but before the reaction could prompt Dirk to idly wonder exactly what kind of _experimenting_ a lonely, freshly pubescent Jake could have gotten up to, he blustered onwards. “At any rate, uh, I never really figured out much on the whole limits front, I’m afraid. There’s a ton of books in the tower, like I said, and they did a bally good job of lending yours truly a good old-fashioned papery helping hand in figuring how the chafing _fuck_ to work this magical nonsense, but, uh...” He swallowed, with some difficulty, face darkening further. “Well to put all the chips on the sodding table, I didn’t really _get_ most of it, Dirk. I was frigging twelve! Eleven when I first tried, but none of the reading desks really fit me and the tomes are heavy as a motherfucker, so I had to wait a year, give or take a couple hundred dozen push-ups or so-”

“Jake.”

“Hm? Yes Dirk, my famed, rugged Dirkopolis, Sir Dirkly Dirkington, Heir Primus to the-”

“You’re wandering again buddy. Easy now, deep breaths big guy.” Dirk smirked. Familiar territory again. This was one of Jake’s cuter stumble-rambles, and he reveled warmly in each one just as much as the last.

“Yes. Right. Good, thank you.” A long, reedy, vaccuming inhalation of air through the nose, a few moments of silence as he gathered himself, and Jake was back on track. “Anyways, I didn’t get much of the not-so-little instruction manuals my mysteriously absent captors- or teachers, I guess?- left for me, but what I could gather basically implied that as long as I just.. sorta... believed in it, I could do whatever the hell I wanted?”

That got Dirk’s eyebrows right the fuck up and awake, his pace slowing slightly as he looked towards Jake, more than a little shocked. “Whoa. Seriously?”

For his part, Jake was a lot less awed, and a hell of a lot more irritated, running a hand through his hair while tossing the other up into the air in that way of his. “I don’t bloody well know! Again, as you have probably inferred, Dirk, it’s been well over a frig-sodding decade since I’ve been able to toy around with the stuff, and when I did I was an ignorant little twerp! I could imagine myself flying and believe it, sure, they left a copy of Peter frigging Pan lying auspiciously about to probably prompt me in that direction, seeing as that was the one blasted bit of magic I absolutely _had_ to learn or be trapped halfway up a goddamn mountain for the rest of my life, but my imagination was kinda limited in the olden days!”

He sighed, disgusted at himself, and Dirk was torn between reaching out to pat his shoulder and not wanting to disturb Jake’s huffy, blustery rage-fest. “Managed to figure out the element stuff while I was on the road to Byrgenn out of necessity, cold nights and what have you, but I really didn’t have time for much else. Certainly didn’t know I could revive the dead or blow up a significant portion of a building until now, so who knows?! I’d say a safe limit would be moving a mountain or parting the frigging sea, but at this point, I can’t even safely say that! ‘s not like I want to be Mr. Supremely-Overpowered Magic-Head anyways, ugh...”

Jake covered his face, grumbling to himself. Dirk sympathized pretty hard with the guy- it wasn’t exactly the same, but Dirk sure as hell hadn’t wanted to be born a Prince. Jake must have- wait. Wait a second. “Jake?”

“Yes?” Jake snapped, self-disgust still coating his voice.

“What was that about blowing up a building?”

Jake stilled, stiffened. “Ah, erm... yes.”

That hesitance was doing absolutely nothing to ease the rapidly escalating tension in the cords of Dirk’s neck and heart. “Jake. What happened after I blacked out at the castle?”

His hands were pressed together now, fingers knotted in a mismatching mess, nerves obvious as he twiddled with his thumbs. “I, uhm, couldn’t possibly know what you mean Strider, I-”

“ _Jake_ ,” he said, and his voice didn’t raise in pitch, or deepen in roughness, but Dirk’s tone palpably _sharpened_ , as if a thousand whetstones ran across his vocal cords in a matter of seconds. “It would be really fucking _spiffy_ if you’d let me in on what happened after I blacked out at the castle the other night. Now, please.”

Dirk said please only very rarely, only when he absolutely needed to know something, and only in a tone that conveyed none of the usual humble submission that the word typically carried. Jake turned grim as he picked up on all of this, and grit his teeth, taking a labored breath. “Yes, you’re quite right. I, uh... as I said, Dirk, I’m not the greatest master of my powers, particularly those I’m not fully cognizant to the existance of, and... apparently very strong emotions can act as a catalyst for equally strong bursts of... it.”

“Of what, exactly?” Dirk asked, tense and chipped.

“Power.” Jake swallowed again, throat clearly dry from both the atmosphere between them and the icy weather that the slowly rising sun was doing very little to dissuade. He looked towards the ground, his words coming out with difficulty, with emotion. “When I saw you get... when that monster shot you, Dirk, I lost it. Just... dived towards you as m’vision turned all red and white and nasty, and... well, I don’t really remember what happened immediately after that myself, but next thing I knew, you were in my arms, all...” A sniff, wet with memory. “...bloody, with some freaky white mist coming out of the bullet holes all over the place. At the time I just, I guess sorta thought that was... I dunno, your soul? Or some horrible aftereffect of the demon’s evil rainbow murder magic or whatever, but I guess in retrospect it was just whatever healing powers I had used on you in the interim doing it’s healy business.”

Dirk nodded, slowly. That was... about what he expected. If Jake had gotten shot, Dirk probably would have had a similar reaction, though with a notably less favorable-slash-magical result. “And the castle?”

Jake nodded, a brief jolt of the head as he wiped at his eyes and nose with the backs of his hands and fingers. “Yes, well, I was sort of... fixated on you, for a bit, but then there was this great crash from behind me, and I turned around, saw we were outside the city walls, with a... pretty hefty chunk of the part of the castle we had been standing in just... gone.”

“What?” That.. shouldn’t have been possible. Even with magic, that castle had lasted several millenia from what Dirk had been taught growing up, weathering siege after siege.

“Yeah, that’s what I said too.” Jake laughed, mirthlessly. “But that’s what I saw. It was like a big, spherical-shaped chunk of that whole corner of the castle had just... evaporated. Bits were still falling off and crumbling to the ground or to lower floors of the palace, that was what had caused that crash I mentioned in the first place, but... it was pretty frigging terrifying, to tell the truth Dirk.”

He could imagine. Large-scale destruction, the kind of destruction that would ruin castles and turn buildings to rubble hadn’t really been seen in what remained of the world since... well, since the Old World’s collapse. Certainly it had never been seen in Dirk or Jake’s lifetimes. Dirk could only imagine what it would be like to see that kind of wreckage and know that, somehow, you were the one responsible for it...

Dirk shook himself from the train of thought. This next part would suck, but he was still Prince of Byrgenn, and he had a responsibility to his subjects to ask. “Jake... I’m sorry to ask, but... when you looked over, did you see any bodies in the debris? Any human remains at all?” Dirk knew almost everyone in the Castle, workers, butlers, guardspeople, ass-lickers to his brother. It was impossible to know exactly how much destruction there had been from just a second-hand account, but... he still had to know.

Jake, though, just let out another dead-hearted chuckle, more of a guttural huff of air into the morning breeze than a noise. “Was more focused on the body in my arms at the time, to be honest with you, Dirk. But... well, after I, uh, took in the damage, so to speak, I managed to catch a glimpse of the not-blown-up parts of the rest of the castle, and... ugh, you aren’t gonna like this but it did not look good, bro. The demon must have been doing... something, before he came for us, but...”

Jake’s steps stilled as he noticed, not too long after it had happened, that Dirk was no longer walking alongside him. in fact, Dirk was standing stock-still a few feet away, staring at Jake’s head, trying to form words. Jake provided some for him. “It... most of it was on fire, Dirk. I’m sorry, I... I worry that we might have been the only ones to make it out, or at the very least those who were still okay that night are in some pretty dire straits right now- _no, wait, Dirk wait!!!_ ”

Dirk had already turned, running back the way they had come, back towards where his castle, his people were suffering. Dying at the hands of... something horrible, he had to _do_ something, he had to _help_ , to _protect_ them, what the fuck else had he been trained for all his goddamn life if not to help his people in their hour of need-

Moments later, far sooner than the small part of Dirk’s brain that was still sensible had estimated, Jake careened into his back, bringing them both down into the grass, Dirk thrashing to get out of Jake’s surprisingly iron-vice-like grip as soon as they landed. “Let _go_ of me English. _**Now**_.”

The grip on his wrists, his arms only tightened, the heft of Jake’s body straddling his legs not budging an inch. “I can’t do that, buddy, I’m sorry, I really am, but I can’t! I know you’re strong and awfully bullheaded when it comes to-”

“Shut the _fuck up_ Jake and let me _fucking go!_ ” Dirk was starting to get pretty emotional now. He had been told all his life that he was a protector, a knight, like the King before him, like their father had been before whatever happened to make Dave have to depose him when Dirk was an infant. This was what he was born for, if he couldn’t protect them, how the fuck could he protect _anything_ important to him?!

Jake still clung tight to him, unyielding. “You don’t understand! This isn’t something you or anyone else can fight, Strider! Not me with my magic, not you with your scary sword skills, hell, not even the King could-”

They both stilled. The King.

Dave.

_A nightmare stood before them. It wore the skin and the shape of Dirk’s brother, but no matter how much it looked exactly like Dave, the nightmare was unrecognizably different. There was no skin covering the knuckles of the hand that, instead of the King’s signature ironically ostentatious and pointy white sword, grasped the top of a golden cane with a glowing emerald handle, bone and blood and decaying tendons pulsing and shifting and hideous. There were no lips hiding the now inhumanly sharp, sharp teeth, teeth that could split shark fangs down the middle, teeth that dug into what was left of the gums keeping them in place. There were no eyes, no old-world aviator shades to hide the ruby-red irises, two unnatural, unreal rainbow pyres burning where they once resided, strobing through the entire color spectrum faster than any mortal brain could comprehend. The grin spread wider, splitting Dave’s (not Dave not Dave fuck no not Dave) cheeks open until every last glistening piece of bone was on display, and there were too many, too fucking many. Dirk saw the cane morph impossibly into a deadly, gaudy rifle, it aimed at Jake next to him. Dirk screamed, Dirk jumped-_

Warm, strong arms wrapped around Dirk’s chest, warm, strong hands running through his hair. Somehow, he was no longer face-down on the grass anymore, instead messily clinging to Jake, his head shoved into the crook of Jake’s neck. His face was a lot wetter than he remembered it being last, a lot wetter than the dewy grass should have left it. Jake shushed at him soothingly, rambled into his ear.

“It’s alright Dirk, shh, easy boy, it’s okay. It isn’t your fault, you great noble fool, this wasn’t on you, wasn’t on anyone except the monstrous bastard who did it, hush now...” His hands were gentle and warm, and while this wasn’t anything close to the hundreds of different scenarios Dirk had imagined Jake holding him and caressing his hair in, it felt just as nice as any of them. Nicer, really.

Dirk lost track of the minutes as they sat like that, legs and arms tangled messily around each other, not giving a shit for the wet and the cold that was seeping through the damp patches all over both of their clothes. Eventually, Dirk calmed, his body and heart catching up with his surprisingly stable frame of mind, and he took a long, slow, shaky breath, let it and most of the remaining tension in his body out in a whoosh. He let himself be held a little bit longer, though. There was still something he had to ask Jake, and the embarrassment and self-disgust that typically would be flowing in full force through his veins from taking such egregious advantage of Jake’s infinitely warm heart hadn’t hit yet. Might as well enjoy things til it did.

In a husky, tear-roughened voice, Dirk asked quietly, “What was that, Jake? What happened to my brother?”

He could feel the tension rise in Jake’s jaw, pressed as it was against Dirk’s temple, could feel the hot, angry-exhausted sigh ruffle his hair. “I only know so much, I’m afraid, but... if my suspicions are right, the most accurate term for him is a Demon. Not the cool kind in all the old-world fantasy adventure movies with the admittedly heavy-handed religious overtones that we’ve seen, bastard’s got no fangs or horns or cloven hooves or what have you, it’s just... a Demon. Books back in the tower said one day he’d come here somehow and ‘rid the land of it’s last hope, extinguish the lights that hold vigil to,’ something something something. Fuckers who wrote all that shit couched it in all this artsy, mysterious poetic falderal but the gist I got was that he’s bad news for what’s left of the world.”

Dirk hummed, thoughtful. He didn’t have anything else to say yet, though, so Jake continued. “The tomes that talked about em back home told me basically to grab the four lanterns held in each of the continent’s major kingdoms before Mister Demony Fuckface got to ‘em. Really emphasized the point too, there were like four noticeably different styles of writing rephrasing the point at the end of the passage.” Weird, Dirk hummed wordlessly, and Jake nodded. “‘s why I came to Byrgenn, as you can probably guess. Damn book straight up told me to go there first, even prophesied all the sneaky, magical shit I’d need to do in order to get in, somehow. Then I met you, lost track of time, all that shit we talked about before, and, uhm...”

Both men warmed physically at that, heat and blood tinting their skin, noticeable all the more as they were pressed up against each other. As troubled as he was by all of this, it did make Dirk pretty damn happy to know that their bond mattered to Jake as much as it did to him. His mind would probably find some way to spin this into a negative later, but again, crying his eyes out earlier was still somehow buffering Dirk against all that shit for the moment. A few more moments passed, then Jake went on. “At any rate, all this mystical, magical quest nonsense just sort of slipped my mind until the other night, when I...” Jake shivered, remembering. “I _felt_ him, Dirk, I could feel some ancient, deeply-woven thread of the world twist and burn with his arrival. Woke me up soon as I conked out for the night, and I knew, I _knew_ right then and there he was coming for us. For me, for _it_ , the weird lantern thingey.” He laughed lightly, helpless. “Again, I couldn’t frigging tell you how any of this happened, that sort of sensation is as new to me as the healing whatsit or the explosion nonsense, but... well, I knew I had to get a move on, so I did. Ran down to the vault to get the first thing I absolutely had to grab on my way out, then started heading up to you for the second, and, uhm...”

The warm feeling in Dirk’s heart was tempered considerably by the tenor of Jake’s voice, the sickly note of fear that colored his words towards the end of his last sentence. He gulped, spoke in a near whisper. “I thought they had just caught wind of what I took, that they were all coming after me, I did, I promise Dirk, but...”

“The demon had already possessed my brother?” It was the first thing Dirk had said in a while, emotionless in tone as it was deeply emotional in every other way.

Jake nodded tightly. “I think so. He must have been making quick work of the rest of the castle, that’s the only explanation I can think of for why it was so fucked up by the time we got out.” It was a small thing, but Jake shook his head as vigorously as he was probably capable of at the moment. “I would never wish ill on your loved ones Dirk, but I hope to hell and all the afterlifes there are that we got the fucker in that blast I let out... but I can’t risk losing you a second time if we didn’t. We have to get to my tower and figure out our next move, get you and the lantern-thingey someplace safe and relatively secure n’ obscure. Then we can figure out how to fight back, but please, not now Dirk, please...”

Another few minutes passed, the two of them sitting like that, mulling over everything in silence. Eventually, Dirk nodded. “You’re right. I don’t honestly understand all this shit- fuck, I don’t understand most of anything that’s happened in the past thirty-six, not really, but... if what you said about the tower is true-”

“It is!” Jake’s emphaticness shocked Dirk, his body jolting back instinctively from the sudden noise. “I wouldn’t lie to you Dirk, not anymore, not ever again, I promise!”

He turned to look at Jake, and... the sheer, unflinching earnestness and desperation that covered Jake’s face shook Dirk to his core. Covering it up, he put on a small ironic smirk and flicked Jake in the forehead lightly. “I know, Jake, it was just a turn of phrase, chill. What I meant was that if those books in your tower were prophetic enough to tell you how to break into Byrgenn without a hitch, they probably have some dirt on how to take down this Demon fucker.”

Jake nodded, the intensity of his expression not going anywhere. “They will, I’m sure of it. Bloody things even told me whose name to scrub out with my own and how to dress so as to blend in with the scenery, where to find a spare soldiery uniform in my size, all that malarkey. If it doesn’t have a step-by-step plan of how to take down this monstrous bastard, I’ll eat my own nuts like an autocanabalistic contortionist! Hell’s bells, you’re here too, you’ll probably be able to understand all that shit way better than I could-”

Dirk cut him off with a gently warning hand to the shoulder and a look. “Easy, English. Just... relax a second, okay? I know you’re excited but just...” Dirk didn’t know how to put it. He couldn’t say that Jake’s enthusiasm was always too fucking cute to him, that he really couldn’t deal with cute right now, all the emotions swirling in his head taking precedence.

Jake seemed to get it anyways, nodding sharply, then taking a deep, calming breath. “You’re right, yes. We, uhm, ought to get going then, probably. It’s still about a four day hike to Mt. Toogoddamnfriggingtallandsharpandshit, and time is of the essence, I’m sure.”

Dirk nodded, and the two of them gingerly extricated themselves from each other’s grasp, all blushes and avoidant looks when certain parts of them inevitably rubbed up against other certain parts. Soon enough they were standing, and with a quick wave of Jake’s hand, a wave of white, gaseous light ran over them both, drying out the damp spots on their clothes in a matter of seconds.

Dirk nodded his thanks, and the two of them set off northwards once again, the wind at their backs a little heavier, the need to put ground between them and what was once home several urgency units to the power of several more urgency units more urgent.

\---

This shit sucked _**dick**_.

A figure, tall and lanky and human if you didn’t look closely and were colorblind and didn’t know what humans typically looked like very well, sat on the edge of the ruined corner of a ruined castle, pissed off and impotently fuming.

This was supposed to go better. For the first time since his last appearance on this planet, there was another Time user alive, they were strong and manly enough to contain his spirit, and, from what he had been told, they were living in direct proximity to two of the bitch-ass fuckers he’d have to murder to ensure his victory. It should have been easy! Fuck that, it should have been easier than easy, he should have been able to fart and this would have gone perfectly.

Nobody had told him the Time-user jackass would fight him so much. Shit, nobody had told him that the gay-ass little Hope fucker would be able to set off a Hopesplosion like that yet, none of his powers should have been even close to awakening yet without training, and he had made real goddamn sure there wouldn’t be anyone left to train anybody the last time he had visited this world.

It was bullshit. He looked at his arm- his shitty, shitty human arm, all mangled flesh and splintered bone, tendons fucked sixty-nine ways to Sunday to the point where he couldn’t even make the hand clench into a fist and jerk himself off. He focused, sending the Time magic that had always come so pathetically easy to him down towards the appendage, rewinding the clock for the entire arm, sending it back, back to where it was nice and fine and healthy and pink and gross, but functional.

The arm jittered, twitched like a VHS tape but with the little plasticy wheel bits that made it play or rewind all fucked up. Skin would heal and stretch and regrow, only to dry and flake and peel off again the next second. Veins would creep back through the arm in their weird, gross, awesome way, only to shrivel and blacken and fall to the floor. Hell, the entire shit-fucking arm would have probably plopped onto the floor if he hadn’t been working his ass off to passively keep the time flowing through it and the rest of the body in relative stasis.

That was the most galling part, if galling was even a word he used (too many letters). He had to work to even stay alive. The fucker who used to own this body- who still inhabited a part of it, somehow, how the fuck did that even work?- kept fighting him, kept using his own control over the timeflow to try and destroy his own body. Like, that was metal as shit, time-based suicide for the good of the world, but it was a pain in the ass to hold down.

It wasn’t _difficult_ , per se, but it was annoying, and he did not like being annoyed.

He gazed down at the gross, mangled human body he inhabited, and sneered, the movement causing more skin to flake off and fall to the slowly growing pile of offal around him. By his estimate... it’d take a couple weeks to crush the last sparks of rebellion out of the body’s original host. Normally he’d just fast-forward through those weeks, but, again, he was fighting a time user, and more than likely the motherfucker would just fast-forward with him. Ugh.

Two weeks, give or take. That’s all he’d have to wait through... but, hey. It wasn’t all bad. Once he managed to fix the arm enough, he’d at least be able to hold his gun, take some potshots at the terrified little human fucks scurrying about in the city below him. That’d be fun.

Yeah. It wasn’t all bad. He could do this.

Sick, twisted hope reignited within him, the demon leaned idly against the shattered stone beside him, and waited for time to do its thing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter's title is taken from the song "Winding Me Up," by The Alan Parsons Project. The song, as well as the album it hails from, Eve, is pretty sexist, and I think that was kind of the concept of the album, to make a whole album pretty much from the POV of a bunch of sexist douchebags, but it was the 80's, so who fucking knows! A lot of rockin' 80's songs are really sincerely sexist if you listen to them! Shit sucks, bro!
> 
> You'll notice that, as I mentioned at the first set of chapter notes, I've added a more serious Depictions of Violence tag to this fic. It really won't come up very often until the action really picks up, but I thought it pertinent to add now anyways. If/when there's more of this shit later in the fic, I'll make sure to warn about it in the top-of-the-chapter-chapter notes too. 
> 
> Behind the scenes shit: This chapter was super tough to write!!! I went through about three entirely different drafts for this fucker, each with a good couple thousand words in them before I realized that they just weren't fuckin' working! Hell, I was *still* adding shit to this the day before it was published. I'm happy with how it turned out, but jeeeeeeeeeze.
> 
> I may just be saying this for no reason, but just in case any of y'all were thinking along these lines, I was very conflicted about the bit where Dirk freaks the fuck out towards the end of the chapter! In Homestuck proper, Dirk is very, very internal with his feelings. He feels very intensely, and his feelings are super fucking important to his motivation in everything he does, but as we all know it's really fucking rare that he ever emotes at all, much less to the point of freaking out and weeping like he does in this chapter. That said, I put that section in for two reasons: One, because Dirk has actually been around people all his life in this fic, including Jake for 11ish years, and even with as stressful a life as Dirk lived during his Princely youth, Jake softened him up a whole fucking lot, helped him be a little more honest and open about his feelings. Not completely, but he doesn't repress fucking *everything* at the very least. Second reason is that instead of growing up idolizing stories and myths he heard about Alpha!Dave and creating a mental image of the guy from that, this instance of Dirk grew up with the dude essentially acting as his father from a very early age, and I wanted to explore what different, unique flavor of fucked-up toxic masculinity Alpha!Dave might impart upon a young Strider as compared to what Bro/Beta!Dirk did to young Dave. Thus, the breakdown, the I-have-to-protect-everyone-or-I'm-worthless shit, the drama! Probably didn't need to justify it like that, but again, like the gore descriptors, it would have seemed a little weird to me were I reading this fic myself and just stumbled across a suddenly super-emotive Dirk breakdown all willy-nilly, so here we are.
> 
> That's all for this week! Next week, Mysteries! Magic! And who knows, maaaaaaaybe more sexy bits too? Who knows?! I do! Hahaha!
> 
> Yeah okay, see you next Monday.


	4. Tounge-Tied and Twisted, Just an Earth-Bound Misfit, I

Five days later, and Dirk is staring up at the sharp, jagged incisor of Mt. Wolcen jutting into the sky.

The five days of travel it took to get there were alternately fantastic and intolerable. Fantastic, because it was five days Dirk got to spend with Jake, doing basically fuck all besides walking, not halving to give a shit about Royal duties or Royal studies or Royal metaphorical-blowjobs-to-the-unfortunately-not-metaphorical-nobility-of-Byrgenn-for-the-slight-chance-that-they’d-shut-up-and-not-bother-him-for-every-little-thing-for-once-in-their-goddamn-lives. None of any of that. Just free time with Dirk’s best friend, time that he had dreamed of having for ages, time to not only revel in the bond they shared, but deepen it, maybe even nudge it a little towards where Dirk hoped and prayed in the depths of his brain that the bond would someday lead.

Except they were also intolerable days, because Dirk wasn’t able to do hardly any of that. They were able to chill, sure, plenty of jokes and banter were tossed back and forth between the two of them, hell there were even a couple of times Dirk managed to get Jake so riled up and so overflowing with built-up energy that he physically leapt at Dirk to tackle and wrestle him into submission. The wrestling matches were definitely the best part of the whole affair, singularly because Dirk knew Jake loved tussling and ‘scrumming’ about, in his words, and definitely _not_ because wrestling with Jake meant _physical contact_ with Jake. Definitely _not_ because, even better, wrestling with Jake meant _guilt-free physical contact_ with Jake. And most definitely, absolutely, positively not because every time Jake’s skin brushed against Dirk’s a hundred memories of all-to-brief but oh-so-savored touch over the years flashed before his eyes, every grapple and attempt Jake made to pin Dirk to the ground sending waves of hope and need and fantasy cascading through Dirk’s mind, every _successful_ grapple and attempt Jake made to pin Dirk to the ground and prying screams from Dirk’s baser instincts of _YES_ , of _NOW,_ of _STAY!!!_

But he never did, and it was never more than that, because when it came down to it Dirk was more of a fucking coward that even he could believe possible, and because as much as Dirk had hoped to everything it was possible for a human to hope to that it would go away and things would go back to normal, even Jake could obviously sense the tension and the distance that still stretched between them. That would stretch between them, until something changed, until enough time passed, until one of them started a conversation neither of them wanted to even think about. And because Jake thought himself a superior in cowardice to Dirk, (no matter how many times Dirk tried to convince him otherwise, he could still _see_ how much of a coward Jake thought himself to be) nothing ever happened there either. Every scrum ended too soon and too fast, both men looking away from each other with the wrong kind of blush on their faces- hell, even the light conversations they managed to hold during their march northward ended the same way, more often than not.

The thought of what they were marching away from, of course, didn’t do a hell of a lot to help matters either.

Dirk had promised to himself that he’d try and remember the good times and shove his memories of the bad as far away as fucking possible, but stick a barrel in both ends and spitroast him for days if it wasn’t the hardest goddamn thing in the universe sometimes.

When it counted, Dirk was able to put that kind of shit out of his mind and focus on the task at hand, though, and now, thankfully, as he watched Jake fiddle and twiddle with his fingers and his cloak a couple feet away, was one of those times. Casually, Dirk cocked his head to the side. “Something the matter, English? What’s the hold up?”

Jake jumped, actually jumped, doing a little hippity-hop in place out of surprise as Dirk startled him from his nervous revere. “What? Oh, yes. sorry Dirk. Just, erm... well, I really ought to prepare you before we head on up to my humble abode, and I’m trying my absolute darndest to think of the best way to do it.”

A smirk. More than a decade of friendship between them, and Jake still left himself open in all the best ways. “My suggestion would be lubing up a finger or three and go one at a time with those if you wanna prepare me so badly, Jake. I mean, that’s what all the best gay porn fics say at least- I’ve read some that use ice cubes too, you could probably manage with some relatively clean snow if you didn’t pack any Old World astroglide in that magical sack of yours. The _other_ magical sack, that is- or I mean shit, I could probably go down on you dry if you were really in a hurry bro, fuck knows I’ve practiced enough-”

Jake had buried his face in his hands the moment it became clear where Dirk was taking this, trying fruitlessly to smother down his rage until he couldn’t any longer and it burst from him, volcano-like, with a furious, guttural cry of **_“STRIIIIIIIIIDERRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!!!!!!!!!”_**

Dirk’s smirk split into a full-blown shitty grin. Perfect. He was an expert at ribbing Jake, but god damn it was a rare treat to be able to do it so artfully, to be completely honest and genuine with his advice, more or less. Sincerity was, after all, the purest form of irony.

Not to mention it brought a certain sick curl of pleasure to Dirk’s cold little heart to be able to talk about that shit openly, or as openly as he’d probably ever get to talk about it. And it was out there now, the information, ironically received or not, floating around inside Jake’s mind. Who knew what doors that might open, some day.

Plans upon plans. Jake didn’t need to prepare Dirk for a goddamn thing, there was barely a moment that Dirk breathed that he wasn’t preparing himself in some way. Okay that wasn’t literally true, but emotionally, yeah.

A few moments of silence passed between them, Jake panting as he listened to the last few, faint echos of “ _Striderrrrr..._ ” echoing from the hills and mountains around them before raising his eyes back to meet Dirk’s again. “You done?”

“Yeah, I’m good now.”

“ _Aces_ ,” Jake hissed. Dirk would be concerned by the anger, by there sheer toxicity of the venom in his voice, but over the years he sort of gathered that Jake kind of liked this in a weird way, that as angry as he got, Jake truly enjoyed being _allowed_ to be angry around Dirk. Everyone needed to vent sometimes, and despite how goddamn cheery Jake was most hours out of the day, it became clear pretty damn quickly into their friendship that there was a vast wealth of fury simmering deep inside Jake’s heart.

Perhaps now, Dirk thought, staring up at the mountain before them, he would finally start to find out where it all came from.

“Well, at any rate, I _was_ gonna dig around in my cranium for the perfect way to intro you to my big, towery casa and don’t you dare say a single flipping word about how you ‘bet you know what else is big and towery,’” Jake emphatically fingerquoted, doing a startlingly good impression of Dirk as he mockingly innuendoed at himself. Dirk just put his hands up defensively, the barest hint of a smile tugging the corner of his mouth up a couple of pictometers, which was all it took to earn another overdramatic disgusted sigh from his friend. “ _Anyways_ , what with your doolallying about and your random sexual nonsense and what have you, I really can’t be bothered to make it perfect at this point, so fuck it, here we go!”

Dirk nodded- this was the main reason he had teased Jake in the first place after all. The poor guy was just as likely as Dirk was to endlessly try and search for the perfect words to say something important to him, and half as likely to ever actually find them. Dirk had always chalked that up to him having a greater mastery of ignoring his nerves than Jake did, though he knew Jake just thought himself stupid for it- which was exactly why he had thought of this alternative to all that bullshit in the first place. Frustrated and exhausted from his own frustration, Jake was far more likely to just say fuck it and do the best he could when it came to this sort of thing, and so far it had always led to more emotionally honest conversations anyways. Less self-hate, less time wasted, deeper best-bro convos. Triple sevens, as far as Dirk was concerned.

Jake sighed, and started. “Okay, so the first thing you need to know is that it’s big. All puns aside, the tower is a seriously humongous motherfucker, Dirk. There’s a little cave about halfway up the mountain that you’d miss unless you were looking for it, and a couple hundred feet in it opens up into this massive cavern that’s basically just the upper half of the mountain hollowed out to fit the bulk of the tower inside. The fucker’s easier to get around in than you’d think, thankfully, lots of man-sized dumbwaiter sorta thingies to get a bloke from one floor to the other, but it’s still an intimidating son of a bitch if you aren’t prepared.”

Still nothing really to do but nod and try to hold back the ‘size of his tower’ puns, which wasn’t that hard to do anyways since Dirk was only _mostly_ a teasing piece of shit, not completely. He had guessed most of this stuff anyways as soon as he saw the sheer size of the mountain up close and in person. Combined with the brief tidbits that Jake had told him on their way here, it was easy to guesstimate what they were heading towards, more or less.

The pause was brief before Jake continued. “Right. Well, the old girl is big, but overall I’d wager that as far as pure floor-space goes, it’s only got about a fourth of what good ol Castle Byrgenn had. There’s a kitchen, a bunch of pantries, all chock full of more canned food than you could... well, more than you could eat, which is rather the point, I suppose. The further up you go, the more it’s filled with about a dozen or so different library-type areas, mostly filled with the same kind of handwritten books and tomes and what have you that I was telling you about earlier, what with the prophesies and instructions and everything, but there are some actual books too, from the Old World. It’d be a pretty nice an atmospheric place on the whole if it wasn’t so dag-blastedly quiet in there all the damn time...”

Jake’s gaze was captured by the ground for a few moments, and beneath it, by memory, before a small cough from Dirk startled him back to life. “Sorry, yes. Libraries- above those are a few more pantries, some training rooms, sparring rooms, armories, all packed onto just a couple floors, pretty modest stuff really, and then up in the big top area are the, uh... uh, the bedrooms, I guess?” He shrugged, uncertain. “I was gonna call ‘em Royal Chambers or something refined like that, and they are pretty refined for what it’s worth, but honestly they’re really just bedrooms when you get down to it. There’s about eight of the bastards, all grouped together on the top two orby floors, but there’s some cots and couches and what have you spread throughout the whole thing, so they aren’t the only place to sleep if the need for a change of sleepy scenery arises. And uhm, what else...”

He looked lost for a moment, muttering to himself inaudibly before he met Dirk’s curious gaze once more. “Can’t really think of anything else to tell you, old chum. There’s plenty to explore and discover on your own, really, but, uhm...” Embarrassment flushed Jake’s features, and he looked... nervous, but a different kind of nervous than before. Uncertain of himself, sort of, but more than that.

Dirk tried to prompt him out of it. “Cool, thanks for the heads up dude. As weird as it is to visit my best friends secret wizard’s tower inside a fucking mountain of all things, I am pretty excited to see your home, to be honest.” He was. Excitement could take many forms, sure, not all of them pleasant, but he was looking forwards to it more than anything else.

Regardless, his gambit seemed to work yet again, and Jake perked right up. “Really? That’s smashing to hear, Dirk, I’m really looking forwards to showing it to you, have been for ages, but...” Jake slowed, perking down, but Dirk gave him a soft smile that he hoped looked as understanding as he was trying to feel, and with a deep breath Jake kept himself level enough. “Well, at any rate, I’m pleased as peach punch to be showing it to you now! Now then, as to how to get up there...”

Dirk cocked his head to the side, confused again. “I assumed you’d just levitate us both up.”

“Mmmh, I thought about that too, but I’ve never actually levitated a whole other person before, certainly not while I was doing it to myself at the same time...” Jake’s bushy brows furrowed, muttering to himself as he tapped the pad of his index finger against his pursed lips in a way that Dirk found super fucking cute. “...no, I might be able to do it but that’s way too high to risk dropping the poor lad... well, I must have caught him at some point after the big boom boom, what if I... to the muscles and then just did me instead, spread out the weight to my body and the floaties to my brainium... yeah, okay.” He shifted his gaze from the far-off nothing to Dirk once more, nodding decisively.. “Alright, got it. Give me just a moment to prepare, Dirk, then we’ll be on our way. Now th- ah, yes, first off; you don’t mind if I sort of, erm... carry you up there myself, in a sort of... bridal style grip, I suppose? I can do fireman’s or something like that, but focusing your weight on my arms would be easiest, if most embarrassing for you, probably, sorry...”

Jake mumbled doubt to himself until, slowly, he noticed the condescending look Dirk was giving him. “Really, Jake? An opportunity to be carried up into the sky by the muscliest, sexiest, most rugged action hero ever to haul his damsel in distress back to his magic castle? You think I’d give that shit up for the goddamn world?”

He rolled his eyes mightily, as if it was an Olympic sport and he was the twelve-time gold medalist. “The ironies, right, how could I forget,” he quipped, incorrectly. Well, mostly incorrectly, sincerity and irony were so indistinguishable from one another sometimes...

A shake of the head, and it was all tossed aside anyways. “Well, let me concentrate for a sec, and we’ll begin.” Jake spread his legs apart to roughly shoulder-width, as if he was getting ready for fucking yoga, or something, and took a long, slow breath in for almost a full minute.

It was cold out. Really fuckin’ cold, if Dirk was honest- had Jake not given him the cool Parka-Trenchcoat earlier, he probably would be off-color and shivering right now, Royal Endurance Training be damned. Cold enough that, as they had been walking through forest and field, once dawnlight truly broke, Dirk spent no small amount of time idly watching the pale wisps of hot air curl and coil out of Jake’s mouth as he spoke. Maybe that was weird of Dirk... well, yeah, okay that was definitely a pretty weird thing for a guy to do to his best friend/secret/maybe-not-so-secret-anymore-hey-wow-is-this-an-opportunity-to-not-think-about-what-happened-that-night-lord-almighty-it-is-wouldya-look-at-that-crush, but it was the innocent, affectionate sort of weirdness that Dirk allowed himself from time to time to slake the sharp pinings in his heart enough to dissuade him from doing anything weirder. Plus Jake never seemed to notice anyways, so it was all chill in the end.

Point being, as Jake slowly, smoothly let out his deep breath, a small part of Dirk’s attention that quickly became a very large portion of it indeed noticed that there wasn’t any hot, coiling mist pluming from Jake’s generous lips (okay he really had to stop thinking like that, this shit was important dammit). Indeed, as far as Dirk could tell, no air left Jake’s mouth whatsoever. Instead, as he exhaled, instead of air traveling out of his mouth, _something_ seemed to flow downwards inside his body, beneath his skin. It was hard for Dirk to describe, or even to understand- the weirdest shit he had seen back home had been some freaky juggling tricks from this weird court jester his brother had found to be fucking hilarious for some nonsensical reason. Magic was still pretty new to him, and as open-minded as Dirk prided himself on being, this was almost beyond him. It was like a candle being moved slowly through a wicker tube, the moving light slipping and shifting through the gaps in the weaving the only sign of its passage.

Except instead of warm, gentle candlelight, this was an otherworldly, too-white light that didn’t shine so much as it _radiated_ outwards, and instead of the non-threatening, reedy sticks of wicker blocking the source of the light from his line of sight, it was Jake, the light, the power seeming to blare through the gaps between the molecules of his skin itself. The wave of energy traveled slowly down through Jake, from his neck into his chest and shoulders, and then out through his arms, bits of energy saturating the parts of Jake that it passed with... whatever it was. Magic, Dirk guessed? It wasn’t what Dirk had imagined when he thought of the concept of magic, no sparkly purple beams of wonder and amazement or whatever the fuck, just raw, supernatural power.

It was a litter terrifying, the intensity of it, the way he could feel the waves of energy that was rolling off of Jake phasing through Dirk’s skin and crashing into his fucking organs, and he had to consciously will himself to relax. _This is Jake, dude. It’s Jake. Weird, freakishly powerful magic bullshit or not, it’s just Jake._

The presence of Jake had been synonymous with the presence of calm, of inner peace, of contentedness and heartfelt happiness for years and years, and the thoughts stilled Dirk’s heart once more. He used to be able to visit emergency hospitals for the kingdom’s monster-mangled and bloodied soldiers with his brother and his mask wouldn’t slip an inch. He could handle this shit. Fuck he hoped he could handle this shit.

The last of the light faded away as it reached Jake’s fingertips, though a faint residual glow still lingered in his skin, through his clothes, and Jake opened his eyes, looking confidant, if a bit sheepish. “Hope that wasn’t too weird for you, mate. Don’t actually know what all this falderal looks like on the external front, so fingers crossed there wasn’t any strange, nude magical transformations or whatever the fuck.”

“Nah dude, I’m fine. It was pretty cool actually,” Dirk half-lied. “There was a sorta miniature light show in the upper half of your body, that’s all. What’d it do, exactly?”

Jake looked interested at Dirk’s description of it, but visibly brushed his curiosity aside for the moment, nodding at Dirk’s question. “Right, right. Well, I sort of just... invoked whatever magic nonsense I’ve got into empowering my arms and upper body and what have you, lending my big rugged muscles with more strength and agility and all that. Now- if I have your permission?”

He shot a curious, innocently plaintive look Dirk’s way, and got a bemused nod of assent for his troubles. Jake grinned. “Smashing. Now then, I just haul you up like so,” Quickly, Jake closed the couple of feet separating the two of them, and summarily swept Dirk off of his feet, Dirk letting out a shocked little yelp as Jake’s arms curled around his upper back and the back of his thighs.

Dirk had daydreamed being held bridal-style by Jake before, but this was not really the context he had imagined.

Jake, for his part, was grinning like a fool, his face flushed, though with embarrassment or a cocky sort of smugness, Dirk couldn’t tell. The competitive part of Dirk hated how good it looked on him. “Now then, my darling distressed damsel dear,” Jake mused with a heroic voice so perfectly old-world Hollywood that he must have practiced it a hundred times in front of the mirror, and yep, that look was definitely smugness now, god fucking dammit. “Just lay back and relax, for I, the Dapper Duelist, will carry you back to safety!”

Dirk couldn’t help but snort, and instantly put a high, dainty voice on, pressing a hand to Jake’s pectorals, the other to his cheek. “Oh, Dapper _Duelist_ , you’re just _so_ manly and rugged and _heroooic_ , whatever can I do to-”

The rest of Dirk’s schtick was cut off as, in a matter of seconds, the two of them rocketed several thousand feet into the air.

Almost as soon as their rise began, it stopped, and Jake hovered in the air for a few moments. Dirk couldn’t help but look around, too shocked from the suddenness of it all to spare a thought to how impossibly high up they were. It was.. .beautiful. Few things (besides Jake) had ever struck Dirk as truly, simply beautiful before, but this view made the list easily.

They were at the very beginning of the Wolcen Mountain Range, which really was less of a range and more just the northernmost chunk of the Gaean Continent, covered completely in mountains of all shapes and sizes. From the ground, it was impossible to tell, and even maps didn’t really do it justice, but this part of the Ranges was incredibly striking in how stark the contrast really was between the gentle, rolling grassy plains spreading out behind and to either side of Dirk and Jake, and the sudden massive spike of rock and snow that marked the beginning of the Ranges and the singular, specific mountain that bore their namesake. Dirk had never thought that it made much sense for there to be such a sudden shift in geography, had quipped to his instructors at the Palace that it was scientifically impossible, unless someone had deliberately designed the area that way. Now that he knew what the mountain held, perhaps he hadn’t been all that far off...

Jake’s mountain, Mt. Wolcen lay at the very center of the mass of the northern peaks- most cartographers went a step further and had wagered that the mountain marked the exact center of the Continent itself, using its peak as the single-continent equivalent of the Old World’s prime meridian. Its peak wasn’t the highest in all of Gaea by far- as far as the Wolcen Ranges’ mountains went it was actually rather modest in size. But what it lacked in stature, it made up in spades with how genuinely imposing it was. There was only one peak to the whole affair, the entire mass almost completely conical, save for a few curves and crevices where yearly snowmelt had eroded its surface away over the millenia. There had been a number of attempts, but nobody had ever actually managed to scale the thing, almost half a dozen well known explorers and adventures ending their careers in various, often grizzly ways trying to reach its apex before all four major kingdoms of the continent banned expeditions there, stacking a high fine and prison sentence on anyone foolhardy enough to attempt the ascent, assuming they even lived long enough to suffer the repercussions.

As a Prince, of course, such laws held little weight for Dirk, and, he supposed, as a (potentially?) all-powerful Magus Supreme or whatever the fuck, they didn’t really mean jack shit to Jake either. Dirk felt Jake’s chest rise and fall, the heat and soft fabric pressing against Dirk’s side as Jake took a deep, appreciative breath of the mountain air. “Home,” he hummed contentedly. Dirk turned his head back to look at Jake, and was met with one of the more contented smiles he had ever seen on his friend.

The flow of air against Dirk’s face shifted, and together they floated gently towards the mountain.

\--

It took only a couple minutes to reach their destination, a small cave hidden in one of the crevices on the southernmost face of the Mountain. The closer they got, Dirk noticed (somehow putting aside the warm, happy mass of Jake humming tunelessly away, pressing up against him, somehow ignoring the tender, comforting spread of Jake’s hand against his back, the too-gentle grip of his fingers against his thigh) that the opening to the cave itself was remarkably tiny, barely half again as tall as Jake was.

Small or not, it was definitely man-made. Barely a couple dozen feet away, Dirk could see that the opening curved in a perfect arch, the ceiling of the cave, if you could even call it that, jutting out a handful of feet, an umbrella-like curve of once-polished stone, protecting the entryway itself from snow and whatever else might rain down from above. Further inside, Dirk could make out carved-stone supports dotting the passageway as far back as he could see, white marble fitted with two distinct types of now-faded metal, with odd, wing-shaped chunks of some kind of ore indented into the archways on either side.

At long last, they landed, Jake floating them fifteen or so feet into the passage before clunking down on the worn tiles paving the floor. He let Dirk down gently and started brushing himself off, stretching the tension and focus that came with long-term travel out of his muscles in the same routine Dirk had seen a dozen dozen times over the years. Typically, he indulged his baser instincts and watched from the sidelines as subtly as was possible, drinking in the movement of Jake’s generous physique shifting and contorting under his clothes, but Dirk’s attention was caught on the setup of the cavern itself this time, and he trotted over to one of the arches he had spied earlier.

This far into the passageway, wind and time seemed to have taken less of a toll on the structure of the cavern, the patina of age barely tarnishing the metals and stone. Closer now, Dirk could see that the archway wasn’t actually marble, or if it was, it was doing a great job of disguising itself as some stone Dirk couldn’t recognize, even with his extensive teachings into every fucking subject imaginable, petrology included. It was white, pure white like marble was, but without the swirls and whorls of darker stone mixed in. Just as hard as marble was though- even harder, maybe, the sound echoing off softly into the passageway less of a ping and more of a dull thunk when Dirk tapped his fingernail against it.

Next to the stone, connecting the large, single cut of rock (and how the fuck did the builders of this place manage _that?_ ) to the walls of the cave was an intricately designed bit of metalwork. Two identical and opposite bits of some sort of steel, or titanium perhaps, had been crafted somehow into the shape of the bodies of two great, incredibly detailed snakes, each about the width of Dirk’s arm, one dyed bright gold, the other a dark purple. They didn’t so much start at the floor of the cave as seem to burrow up from underneath it, the gold one pressed tightly against the stone archway, the purple against the wall of the cave, until they crossed one another and switched, continuing the pattern all the way up and across the length of the arch until they burrowed back down into the floor on the other side of the cavern, the only thing interrupting the incredible artistry of the design being the occasional gold or purple bolt piercing through the body of the snake into the wall or the archway, to keep them in place. Looking closer, Dirk could see that not only was each bolt patterned on the top with an incredibly intricate spirograph pattern, but the surface of the snakes’ bodies themselves seemed to curve inwards slightly where the bolts pierced them, the same way the pierced flesh of an actual snake’s body would.

It was an incredible piece of functional artwork, something that would have taken even the smiths at the royal palace months upon months to finish- and checking the other side of the arch, Dirk was both shocked and increasingly unsurprised to find another identical piece pinning that side together too, the pattern presumably replicated on each of the passageway’s couple dozen other arches.

Dirk was about to turn to Jake to comment on all of this, to say how fucking impressive it was, how fucking ridiculous it was, before his eye was caught by the one last significant part of the stone-and-metalwork. Inlaid at about chest height into the not-marble were several delicately cut pieces of... something. It was impossible to tell what it was, not without a full geological kit and a lab to examine samples of the hard, almost translucent substance, but each individual piece looked as cared for and as precious as the gems in the rarely-worn Crown of Byrgenn itself. It would be more apparent the further into the cave he and Jake traveled, but the maybe-gemstone also seemed to be a bit luminescent, imbuing the white stone around it with a faint glow the same cream-gold color as the gem itself.

Just as significantly, or perhaps more so, Dirk wasn’t sure yet, when all the cuts of gemstone were taken together, it was clear that they had been laid into the archway in a shape that remained distinctly familiar in Dirk’s memory, even as other aspects of the horrifying night six days ago had faded. A pair of ostentatious, curling wing-like shapes, with two sharp spikes jutting out in opposite directions at the bottom.

The exact same symbol that had been emblazoned on the chest of Jake’s ridiculous costume that night.

Dirk turned slowly this time to look towards Jake, who, now having finished brushing and dusting himself off, seemed to have been busying himself watching Dirk’s examination of the archway. He looked... embarrassed? That didn’t make sense, really. Why would the ever-mounting absurd impressiveness and regality of the fucking _entryway_ to his secret magic cave-tower and the equally ever-mounting significance of Jake himself be something to get embarrassed about? Like, Jake had always been shy in some ways, but he never seemed to get tired of praise or when he was made to feel important.

Jake kicked his foot against the floor in that little fucking nervous, anime-ass mannerism Dirk just _knew_ Jake had copied from the dozens of old-world shows he had roped Jake into watching over the years, probably adopting the habit in the (fruitful) hopes that it’d ingratiate him to Dirk even more. When he spoke, it was to Dirk, but also to the (also gold-and-purple, Dirk could now tell) tiled floor of the passageway. “Uhm, I’ve got a little bit of an inkling as to what you might be wondering, Dirk my old sausage, but uhm... you wouldn’t mind terribly if we added this one to the list of shit we talk about once we’re all settled in and cozy in the tower, would you? It’s a long bloody story, and I don’t really know the whole tale of it if I’m honest. and I’d much rather dive into the whole affair with my bod surrounded tenderly by a plush armchair, the warmth of a good roaring fire, and a few drops of quite-sweet tea if at all possible.”

Dirk was silent for a few moments, that creeping, crawling, intense distaste for Jake hiding shit from him making its way up the back of his throat. Under his expressionless gaze, Jake nervously cracked a very small, weak smile, his voice rising a bit higher. “We can make it orange-peel tea, if you like? Heh, we could, uhm, even add obscene ammounts of sugar and some warmish soda water to it, eheheh....”

He was pandering to Dirk’s basest desires, (which, outside from Jake himself, always included some delicious orange soda on their basest desire-list) and in spite of himself and the burning, sickly curiosity that filled him... “...yeah, alright. That does sound pretty sweet. ‘m starting to feel pretty fucking tired anyways, might as well shelve this shit til tomorrow, I guess.” He wasn’t lying. As much as Dirk’s first instinct was always to dive right to the heart of a problem and chip away at it until it gave out, the past several days were really starting to catch up to him now that they had arrived, and whether it was on a nice bed, a shitty bed, or some sort of weird, mage-tower couch thing, he could really use some peaceful fucking shuteye right about now. Admittedly, yes, it wasn’t the best idea to go napping like that in the middle of the day, but Dirk was pretty accustomed to keeping odd hours every now and then, and shit, it wasn’t like there were any Royal guards or caretakers or brothe... or whatever to tell him off for it anymore. So fuck it. Naptime, bitches.

Jake seemed to be pleased by this, and nodded. “Understood, sir, and I’ll fill your ears to the brim with knowledge come the morrow! For now, let’s head on through, then I’ll show you to your room, fix you up something nice too if you get a bit peckish while you settle in, eh?”

Dirk nodded idly, and they began to walk down the passageway, the gentle echoing clopping of their boots against the tile flooring lulling Dirk into a weary daze. It must have been several minutes, Dirk was having a harder and harder time telling, but eventually the passageway started to open up, a much brighter, wide open space visible through the passageway’s exit ahead of them.

Stepping through into the main cavern, any sleepy doziness Dirk had been experiencing fled his body like fire from an ocean-doused candle as he took in what lay before him. The cylindrical cavern itself was _enormous_ , easily as vast and sprawling as the palace grounds themselves, except the ground, the walls, the ceiling barely visible far above them, were all completely, utterly flat, all shinily-polished not-marble, inlaid with hundreds and hundreds of those same glowing wing-shaped arrangements of gemstone. The walls of the cavern held much larger versions of the emblem, the wings of the symbol easily as wide as four Dirks with their arms stretched out to either side, the floor dotted with hundreds of smaller symbols, about the size of the ones in the passageway before, but arranged in concentric circles, like the rings of a tree, or ripples in a pond, centering on the base of the tower itself.

If the cavern was mind-bogglingly huge, the tower was enough to melt the synapses of a weaker, sleepier man. Jake had been right, from edge-to-edge it was easily around a quarter the size of the floorspace of Dirk’s entire castle back home, but four times as tall to make up for it, a grand, perfectly circular beam of that same mysterious white stone, shooting up into the upper reaches of the cave. It was hard to make out very well from this far below it, but Dirk could see that the main body of the tower spread out at its highest point, like a titanic cane topped with what looked to be a perfectly spherical handle.

Dirk’s mind flashed to another cane topped with a perfectly spherical handle, gold and green and horrific rainbow flashing through his mind before he quite firmly shoved that train of thought off the tracks and sent it careening down into the valleys below.

Jake must have sensed how utterly shook Dirk was by the sight of this- in fact, he may have been expecting it, Dirk finding that his friend’s hand had been softly clapped onto his shoulder from probably the moment the sight of the cavern had stopped Dirk in his tracks. Dirk turned, dumbly, towards Jake, mouth working without any real results for a few moments (much to Jake’s apparent amusement) before managing a trite, but sufficient “Shit, dude.”

Chuckling, Jake nodded. “Quite so. Come on, my good man, let’s get you inside and settled. I daresay you look just about ready to topple over here and now, and we can’t have that.”

Dirk nodded, and they headed towards the oversized double doors sitting at the base of Jake’s stupid-huge, weird Wizard’s Tower.

\---

The instant they crossed the threshold and the familiar warmth of several already-lit (automatically tended to? Electronic?) fireplaces curled around Dirk, the lethargic daze from before returned with double the strength. He knew Jake was talking besides him, arm still wrapped around Dirk’s shoulders, as they navigated through the bottom floor of the tower, but his eyes and brain only recognized soft, blurry, generalized shadows of the sights and sounds Dirk was met with. Jake seemed to recognize this after a couple minutes, and with a warm chuckle and a fond squeeze that had Dirk instinctively pressing more against the warmth of his friend at his side, he cut his guided tour off and just weaved his way through the tower on what Dirk idly guessed to be the most direct route to bed-land.

Passively, he recognized several pulley-operated lifts that seemed to carry the two of them up automatically as soon as they stepped onboard, several sitting areas, a lab, a kitchen, another kitchen, bookcase after bookcase after bookcase, and finally, after who the fuck knew how long, a warm, redwood-looking door emblazoned with a weird looking heart on the center.

“Here we are, then,” Jake murmured, low and slow enough for Dirk to make out, and he twisted the dark purple handle of the door, the latch popping open with the audible reluctance of neglected metalwork. It swung open with a light shove from Jake, and while Dirk could tell that the bedroom in front of them was as expansive and grandiose as the rest of the tower, his blurry vision and blurrier brain couldn’t make out a single goddamned detail of any of it.

After a couple of moments, Jake seemed to pick up on that too, another chuckle/squeeze-2x-combo going off before he led Dirk over to what seemed to be a very large four-poster bed, complete with maroonish curtains and everything. Jake drew them aside with a strangely dustless whoosh, and patted Dirk’s shoulder. “Here we are, mate. Your home away from home, fine as you like. Now, let’s get you out of that bloody winterwear- I’ll scrounge up some toasty PJs for you tomorrow, but you should be okay in your shirt n’ khakis for now.”

Dirk felt himself getting gently pushed and pulled about, the gentle _thump_ of fabric meeting flooring behind him as Jake shucked him out of his extraneous layers. Left, after a minute or so, in a skull-emblazoned t-shirt and some tan pants Jake had lent him on that first night, Jake gently sat Dirk down onto the bed- holy _fuck_ that was a soft fucking bed. Jake was obviously going to help Dirk lay down too, but the sheer force of _comfort_ that flooded through Dirk from the ass up was enough to melt him into a floppy, boneless mess, and he clawed the rest of the way up onto the bed, rolling into a ball on his side, his back to Jake and his head nestled amongst several impossibly soft pillows.

There was a very gentle, very content chuckle from behind him, and Dirk felt himself getting moved around a little as Jake pulled the blankets out from underneath Dirk, tucked him in snugly. There was a flush of ambient warmth as Jake seemed to hover, hesitant, near Dirk’s face, then backed away, ruffling his hair lightly. “Sleep well, tiger. Pleasant dreams. I’ll be in the- oh, I’ll just leave a bloody note, what am I even doing...”

A gentle scribbling sound behind him, another warm hand carding tenderly through his hair that Dirk tried to press sleepily into, a handful of carpet-softened footsteps, and with the latch of the door settling quietly into place, Dirk was alone.

He slept.

He tried to sleep.

Fuck.

It was impossible to tell what time it was, how much time had passed, when Dirk’s consciousness half-returned to him. There were undoubtedly some clocks scattered throughout the room, at least one, he was sure, but not having caught sight of one before he passed out, and with his internal clock sleep-marred as it was, Dirk had no way of knowing how long it had been.

He flopped onto his back, seeking sleep-soothing comfort and finding none, then onto his other side. Still restless. Still _tired_ , he could tell he still needed sleep, but something kept him from chasing that particular rabbit down its particular hole.

Dirk was frustrated, but too sleepy to hold onto any sort of angry feeling that took as much energy and attention to maintain as frustration did. He took a deep breath, sighed it out slow and calmly, and nudged his mind to try the old reliable.

He imagined Jake.

He imagined Jake chattering quietly around him, gently teasing Dirk on how tired he looked, poor thing. He imagined Jake ridding himself of everything but his briefs, and Dirk suddenly felt far too burdened by his own clothing, followed his imaginary-Jake’s lead.

He imagined Jake crawling under the covers towards him, the soft-firm warmth of Jake’s bare chest pressing up against the tight, corded muscles of Dirk’s back, reaching an arm around Dirk’s chest to nestle idly above Dirk’s heart.

He imagined reaching up to hold Jake’s hand, Jake humming contentedly behind him at the gesture and snuggling even closer, and Dirk shifted his position on the bed, scooting his ass farther back and tilting his chest farther forwards so Jake could properly spoon against him.

He imagined the warmth of Jake pressing more completely, more flush against his back.

His mind wandered from the cosy, sleepy imagery, and he imagined the warmth of Jake’s cock pressing against his ass.

The Jake of his imagination noticed too, arm tightening around Dirk’s chest as he shifted his hips, rolling them, grinding idly against Dirk, and Dirk let out a soft moan as he returned the gesture, the firm line of Jake’s imaginary dick rubbing between the cheeks of Dirk’s very real, increasingly sensitive ass.

He imagined Jake’s hand fishing Dirk’s cock out of his briefs, replicating the motion with his own real hand, and he imagined Jake starting to pump him in time with the rolling of their hips, slow brushes of warm, calloused skin quickening and tightening as the rhythm of Jake pressing against him gained speed.

He imagined their briefs vanished, the hot of Jake’s dick pressing against him, Jake shifting his hips back so that the sensitive vein along the bottom could rut and grind directly against home base. Dirk could feel a warm wetness at the tip of his dick as he imagined Jake spreading Dirk’s cheeks apart, imagined the length of his cock running against the impatient need of his entrance as Jake growled and crooned into his ear.

Dirk panted, moaned needily as he imagined Jake letting go of Dirk’s cock, only to silence his moaning by sliding his fingers into Dirk’s mouth, and Dirk imagined what else could take their place, leaking more as he imagined laving warm, wet attention to Jake’s fingers. He imagined Jake taking his time, their hips still managing to keep pace as Dirk moaned around Jake, before they slowly slid out from his lips, wet and warm and glistening.

He imagined Jake reaching down between their hips, mirroring the motion himself, as imaginary-Jake pressed against Dirk, Dirk’s well-practiced, eager need allowing one digit to slide in easily, pressing into Dirk as he moaned into the pillows. Another joined the first soon after as Jake slid in and out of him, spreading him wider, preparing him, almost teasing, almost perfect, almost filling Dirk until he couldn’t take it any longer-

He imagined Jake moaning his name, fingers suddenly gone, as he slid inside of Dirk, and Dirk moaned his name right back, heat and pressure and girth and _Jake_ filling him completely, making his heart briefly, desperately full as he pressed further and further into Dirk.

His imagination fragmented, brief flashes of imagery egging Dirk on as he stroked and thrust into himself, closer and closer to release. He saw, _felt_ Jake thrusting eagerly into him, _felt_ the hard smack of their hips meeting and parting again and again, _felt_ the tight, desperate curl of Jake’s fingers into his arm, his hips, around his cock as good as if Dirk was fucking Jake at the same time.

He imagined fucking Jake even as he was fucked. He imagined a third Jake sliding between his lips, the taste and scent and feel and warmth and hot of Jake everywhere around him. He imagined, saw, _felt_ Jake clinging tighter to him, tightening around him, clawing into his hair as they came closer and closer and closer and closer-

He imagined, remembered, saw, felt Jake’s lips desperately meeting his own, kissing him back to life, cried Jake’s name, and Dirk came harder than he had as far as he could remember.

Dirk panted, hand stroking the last remnants of his orgasm from his dick, rubbing the last remnants away in his ass, then, spent, flopped onto his back.

Minutes, hours, days passed. His chest rose up, sank down. Warmth lingered.

There was a water basin on the other side of the bed, and he washed his hands and face in the somehow warm and yet not stagnated water, cleaned himself dry with the assortment of soft maroon towels next to the basin, and, now on the dry side of the bed, he passed out again.

\---

“Fuck, Dirk, _Dirk_ , ** _Dirk-_** ”

Jake English clenched, one hand muffling his cries, the other working him through a release he had been desperately needing for nearly a week, then flopped, exhausted, against sheets he hadn’t touched in more than a decade.

He raised his come-slicked hand in front of his eyes, having long-since mastered the art of catching it all within his palm, avoiding anything that might rouse suspicion, might rouse questions. His eyes scanned to his left- hah, right where he left it.

“Dude, of course it’s right where you left it,” a familiar, deep, drawling voice quipped at him from across the room as Jake retrieved a handful of tissues to tidy himself up with. “What, you think a platoon of Cinderella’s freaky, servile mice and rats kept this place neat and tidy during your grand, dashing adventure?”

“Oh shut it, you,” Jake groaned, tossing the remains of his pleasure expertly into a nearby wastebin. His familiar companion complied, and silence lingered in the room. Jake tried to concentrate on the pulse of his heartbeat in his chest, tried to calm himself back down from his high.

“You’re gonna have to tell him, you know,” the figure nagged. Well, the voice was gentle, actually, the intention not to annoy but to softly remind. A lot of things fell under Jake English’s mental categorization of nagging, not all of them bad.

“Yes, I know.”

“No, like, about _everything_ Jake.”

“I know, mate.”

“About me.”

“I know, mate!” This was starting to creep into bad-nagging, or at the very least distinctly annoying.

“...about _you_ , Jake. Us. All of it.”

Jake didn’t have a response for that one.

“...it’s only gonna be worse if you don’t. Yeah, it’s been years of hiding it, it’s a nice excuse, but it doesn’t do jack shit to change how much he’s gonna explode if he finds out on his own. If he doesn’t hear it from you-”

“Mate.” Jake’s tone was commanding, laced with power, and silenced the other instantly. “I’ve got the message. Alright? I’ve got it. Just... I need time, okay? It’s hard for me too, you know.”

There was no answer, and Jake felt the occupancy of his bedroom lessen by half. Alone, nervous, Jake sighed as he curled onto his side, slid under his sheets.

“I just... need time.” Jake sighed, tired in too many ways, and tried to soothe himself to sleep.

Far away, and very close too, time started to slowly, but not slowly enough, tick, tick, tick away...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter's title comes from the song "Learning to Fly," by Pink Floyd!
> 
> In contrast to the last chapter, this one took about two frigging days to write! In a significant lack of contrast to the last chapter, I'm still working on Ch. 5! It's giving me a lot more trouble than I thought to get started on the fucker, and while I don't think it'll take a whole week + to finish it from where I am now, who knows?! Basically, just please be understanding if next Monday comes and goes without an update over here- it is coming, just as Dirk did at the end there EYYYY but it might be a couple days late.
> 
> Also, thank you guys for the modest handful of comments you've been leaving- I haven't been able to respond just yet, but they've all made me smile a lot and brought much-needed warmth to my adorably little, adorably gay heart. X}D 
> 
> Also also, that face ^ up there is -indeed- a typical XD face, but with a } in the middle serving as a fancy mustache accessorizing the face's upper lip. Pretty sweet, I know~
> 
> Okay, enough bullshit, see y'all next week!


End file.
